katya ev
(ekaterina vasilyeva)

(Excerpt from the very start of the film to 01:01:37)

The film features the 17-hour performance Axe de Révolution (2014), during which the artists silently walked through Moscow from the northernmost point on the orbital highway to the southernmost point, carrying a 6-meter-long, 13.5-kilogram metal structural element with a rectangular section. The film conveys the scale of the journey in terms of time, thus giving the viewer a glimpse of the bodily experience of the performance. It offers a portrait of Moscow, capturing a cross-sectional view of the cityscape as the artists move from sunrise to sunset, traveling from the periphery to the center and back. Katya Ev

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​​"Axe de Revolution (2014) is a 17-hour performance, during which the artists silently walked through Moscow from the very North point of it on the orbital highway to the very South point, carrying a 6 meter long 13,5 kilo heavy metal structural element of rectangular section. While the Sun was moving from the East to the West, they were heading forward along a straight 45 km long line through the city,  synchronizing their way across Moscow’s circular urban structure, that in its shape reminds the Copernican heliocentric model (Copernican Revolution), and constructing a cross with the trajectory of the Sun. The initial latin term revolution, as coined by Copernicus, means circular motion, while in everyday use it expresses a drastic overturn (usually in political sense). Further from being historically charged with the imaginaire of the Great Russian revolution, this ambivalence underlines  artists’ intention ‘to coordinate the movement of a cosmic body’ and their ‘intimate endeavor of inner profound revolution [...]". Katya Krupennikova, The End of the World, Centro Pecci, Prato (It), 2016​​, p. 352-353