Set in a fictional future timeframe when Russia’s current war against Ukraine is already concluded, the video installation unfolds as a sequence of four tableaux where elderly Russian soldiers openly recount, as much as cover up or ignore, their roles and responsibilities. Sometimes they engage with an invisible audience, other times with themselves, but also with voices who interview them off camera and are played by the artists. The soldiers are performed by Ukrainian actors whose careers were built on playing characters from Russian literature and drama in Soviet Ukraine’s theatres.

In this ambiguous mise-en-scène, speech and silence follow shifting configurations, from forms of justification in which responsibility appears diffused and absorbed into the logic of a system, to moments where language falters or drifts into incoherence, or where speech moves toward confession without reaching resolution, extending to states suspended in the proximity of death, between unconsciousness and lucidity, that resist comprehension.

The work approaches victimhood as a position defined by a demand for acknowledgment that remains unfulfilled as much as the end of violence and aggression feels like an ever-moving the horizon. Drifting between staging and testimony, propaganda and truth, collective history and personal memory, what emerges from this unreliable story-telling is a suspended field where the possibility of repair in the future remains uncertain and deferred, and the only certainty seems the banality of evil in the present. (Text by Bianca Stoppani for Canicula)