Choosing the distance: speculation, fakes, forecasts in the era of coronation, installation, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, 2021

Light Songs is the first joint work of three authors, where Marina Karpova was the author of the music, Maria Morina was the author of the libretto, and Ekaterina Sokolovskaya was the author of the sculptural group. The installation, in which viewers are invited to listen to the opera, consists of five tactile sculptures on which you can freely position yourself: sit, lie, swing or slide along the surface. Their delicate colors and tactile surfaces create an invitingly comfortable environment, whereas opera presents a rather difficult-to-perceive form. The starting point for the development of the idea was thinking about several levels of communication: the work is realized simultaneously in the space of music, where lies are impossible, and in the space of language, where consciousness needs to separate meaning from noise and recognize manipulation.

The libretto, which is sung to the accompaniment of a contemporary music ensemble (soprano, baritone and countertenor parts accompanied by a quartet of clarinet, flute, viola and cello), is based on documentary poetry - the principle of creating a poetic text using a montage of quotes from found documents. The sources underlying the final text are listed on the back of the printed libretto: these are scientific and journalistic articles about COVID-19, official speeches of the first person of the state and his representatives, the poetic work of the head of Roscosmos, as well as random messages on social networks - taken out of context and often meaningless phrases about the coronavirus and the delayed effects of its treatment, vaccination and conspiracy theories around the pandemic, the 75th anniversary of the Victory and amendments to the Constitution, the daily physical and emotional labor of women, etc. The leitmotif for understanding the entire semantic collage can be the phrase of Dmitry Peskov: “We see that there is a consistent process of improvement, a process of cementing necessary for the full and irreversible strengthening of the state.”

Overcoming aesthetic isolation thanks to the declared identity of speech, the complex subject of docupoetry carries out an ethical translation of the document-evidence, drawing its discursive subjects into the orbit of its influence. 2. It is symptomatic that the first wave of docu-poetry brought to life by the “pressure of reality” occurred during the Great Depression in America 1920–1930s. Its historical analogue is the past year, when Bright Songs were conceived and when, according to the authors, “we were faced with something total” that “buzzed through the membranes of social networks, flooded the hallways with the smell of bleach and stuck at the cellular level, bypassing consciousness.”. In an attempt to describe a shared experience, Light Songs poetically transposes documentary evidence that, in a deferred future, may turn out to be forensic evidence.