Lifted from the ground, extracted from the plane surface, this line is shifted to the space, which unfolds around it due to the effort of the carriers. It sets the space in motion, pierces it, makes its mobility tangible, educes it. In relation to landscape and architecture the experience of the size of the tube changes. It ties the bodies of the carriers and at the same time it forces them to stay in distance, sharing the burden.
The axis is a condition: an object which creates meaning that we perceive while marching and carrying. We extract an ordinary gesture (two workers carrying a construction object) from the context of building, we deprive it of its commonly approved functionality and liberate it from class identity. Our action is a ceremony and a ritual.
The axis is a pivot which we create through marching and carrying. It is a foundational element around which events unfold as well time and space. Our movement is an attempt to pierce abstraction and geometry through an unusual endeavour.
The axis is a conventionality: a supposed line which pierces a supposed ring. In reality this vertical axis doesn’t exist - we create it through marching and carrying. In a plane a movement from North to South is a top to bottom movement perpendicularly to the trajectory of the movement of the Sun from left to right. The movement of the carriers is a motion forwards whereas the movement of the sun doesn’t exist at all: this choreography is possible only due to rotation of the Earth around its axis of revolution. The axis is therefore connection between the factual and the sensed.
Body and city are interrelated. Our relation with a city are conditioned by our bodily experience of it. We are interested in exploring the margins of the city, topographic as well as social and semiotic, and also in enquiring what the city excludes from the mundanity for reasons of utility, practicability and common sense.
Extraordinary and unusual length of the pathway and the size of an object create conditions for extreme concentration needed for accomplishing a mission that has no practical value and purpose. Our movement creates a common experience not of a functional relation, but of a relation of intimacy: sensual experience and interaction between the marching and dynamical space of the city. The city ceases to be an abstract cartographical phenomenon, but becomes a real bodily experience, a long pilgrimage.
Unusual conditions of bodily practice, which we intentionally create, engender a different way of seeing and living the city, which means it maintains a new memory and a possibility of an alternative history.
Ekaterina Vasilyeva & Hanna Zubkova
text published on the internet the day before the performance
Axe de Révolution, 2014
17 hours, 45 kilometers
site-specific performance, Moscow, August 2014
unique
courtesy of the artists
(Katya Ev & Hanna Zubkova)