Collaborative project / sculpture
2024
Participants: Veronika Kolobušina (18), Alisa Lisienko (18), Charlotte Barch (16), Reinhold Oster (17), Anna Zurova (16), Ekaterina Koreshkova (17), und Emeli Šabanina (15)
Over the course of two months, a group of teenagers from Narva worked on a book sculpture made from found objects sourced from trash, the streets, or their homes.
The central question during the meetings was: Which pieces of trash can serve as artefacts of culture and history to tell the story of Narva, an Estonian town at the border of Estonia und Russia?
For the final exhibition at NART, Narva Art Residency, the participants wrote essays to discuss what Narva should get rid of and performed them in front of the audience.
This was the first project in Narva, Estonia, followed by the Passport project⧉ which addresses the extreme proximity to Russia and its influence on the locals.
In a series of meetings, local teenagers addressed the topics of the Estonian citizenship, “grey passports”, Soviet legacy, stereotypes about girls and women, patriarchal violence, Russian impact in the border town. As a result, each of those issues is represented at each page. Each arrangement is composed of the material objects that were found at home or in the street and meant to be thrown away.
Documentation of the workshops: Ikuru Kuwajima
Group chat initiated during the project.
The teenagers used it to communicate and discuss “what Estonian is”.
After the project ended, on March 2, 2024 the trash book was added to the local library. Since then, it has been exhibited in two other libraries of the region (in Narva and Olgina) and is currently on display in Narva-Jõesuu, Estonia.