Seatilework

Since the middle of March, I have been stuck in Montenegro. The country closed the borders on the 16 March, when I had my return ticket to London. I came there for a long weekend to celebrate with my son and his family my and my younger grandson’s birthdays.

I brought a gift for the little one but no clothes, no shoes, no laptop. That was a challenge: instantly, they cancelled shopping apart from food and medicine. What fun it was to discover one day a pharmacy selling underwear! My consumption happily reduced to zero. Instead, I acquired a family with two little boys and the sea. Also, we faced curfew, - but who cares, after all, I had an experience of surviving under a communist regime. 

Meanwhile, my consumption transmuted into a gathering. I can’t resist collecting bits of ceramic tiles washed up by Adriatic waves to build my lockdown anti-consumption visual diary. I have been finding them at the beach and in the sea since April. A bit later, I started my "live" mosaicking on a useless velvet sofa placed in my bedroom on its side, never glueing them physically to fix the mosaics in real life. However,  there was one exclusion: moving out to another flat, I produced a farewell souvenir for my beloved landlady Bosa. That piece has been immediately placed on a real wall in Bosa's living room. This is the only non-”live” mosaic in the series; some real glue has been used in it.  

...Once the rules of lockdown confinement became milder in Montenegro, I started experimenting with more different backgrounds, mostly outside. The series of digital photographs documenting my "live" mosaicking process day after day become my anti-consumption diary.  The idea of anti-consumption became my passion during the lockdown - instead of shopping.  

Once I have not brought any digital equipment with me from London (just to remind, I came here to spend a long weekend here with my family). Thus, the only equipment I  am using is my smartphone Honor 8.  
Some of the photographs have been slightly processed with Photoshop (for example, to extend the background for the Instagram format)  or cropped by Instagram itself by default (I am a brand new Instagrammer who begun Instagram account during lockdown).

Media: digital photography, mosaics.

https://www.instagram.com/be_heard_museum/
https://www.arts.ac.uk/study-at-ual/postgraduate-study/postgraduate-community/stories/seasidetilework-for-wiop-vol.2


Seatilework (series of photographs)

ПУТЧЁSELF was conceived as an interactive online video film by a Moscow based video artist Margarita Novikova and a London based filmmaker Elena Michajlowska with support from the Yeltsin Centre. Launched in January 2012 at the Moscow Centre of Design ARTPLAY, ПУТЧЁSELF retells the story of the Soviet Coup d’Etat of 1991 through personal accounts of these events which lead to the ultimate demise of the USSR in 1991. 
Original artistic version of the project is available on Yeltsin Centre's website (http://www.yeltsincenter.ru/news/article/putcheself-ili-o-trekh-dnyakh-avgusta-v-seredine-surovoi-zimy). In addition to the main project, a short documentary animation was created to mark the 20th anniversary of the Coup in 2011. The animation was shown on the radio "Echo of Moscow" web portal and promoted by "Snob" magazine and BBC Russian service. A version of the animation with English subtitles can be found on Vimeo (http://vimeo.com/27775407).

The original purpose of this project was to do an artistic study of the collective memory associated with this very controversial event in Russian history. With each new interview recording it became apparent that the experience of the Coup is still a very sensitive and a dividing issue for the Russian society. No official conclusions have been drawn and general school curriculum glosses over the subject leaving a whole post USSR generation with a knowledge gap. During public screenings the authors have discovered just how little is known about this historic event which changed the course of history. These findings prompted authors to set up a museum version of the interactive film adding full interviews as well as archival documents and photographs donated to the project. 

Current version of ПУТЧЁSELF presented at the University of Leeds (Great Britain) in November 2012 consists of:

1) automatically loaded interview snippets arranged to tell the story of the Coup with options to pause and restart
2) character facemap, allowing viewer to navigate through different stories by clicking on participants' faces
3) archival material (photographs and documents), thematically placed to illustrated stories and provide additional information
4) full interviews, stored externally on vimeo.com and available on demand

This version of the project can be viewed at www.putchyourself.com

The unique value of this project lies in its ideology-free approach to collecting and recording historic memory while making it accessible and easy to take in. The authors are looking for a sizeable platform to accommodate the project and take it to the next level in preparation for the 25th anniversary of the Coup in 2016. 


ПУТЧЁSELF (putschyourself)

The video is a sort of experimental self-portrait. The author had an intention to solve one of her personal psychological and may be a philosophical problems. She was afraid of huge apple harvests at her grandmamma summer house in childhood and many years after - and did not understand why. After making a sort of experimental personal performance and video about it the author realized that she did not believe in parents' and grandparents' happiness about the harvest. They felt happy and protected not because of what they were (came as they were) and their love to each other but because of lot of food. It is understandable, but life is about love, not food only.

harvest.sublimations

The video is a sort of experimental self-portrait. The author had an intention to solve one of her personal problems and understand, what is love and what do people do to find a real one. For this purpose the author made a sort of experimental personal performance: what happened in case if Cinderella's story was "inverted"?  And it was she who looked for the Prince. And not with a help of the shoe but only a sock - a thing that suit the size to many Princes

Cinderella 2.0

Animated documentary about Soviet coup d'état in August 1991 - in 10 personal stories. Co-author: Elena Michajlowska. 
A part of interactive video project about Soviet coup d’etat-1991 "ПутчЁself" -  www.putchyourself.com - created in collaboration with Elena Michajlowska and presented at Art of Memory show (Moscow, 2012) and Leeds Russian Centre, University of Leeds  (Leeds, 2012)

ПутчЁself 

Filmed in August-September 2012 during 1-month expedition in Pacific with the only one short stop at wild Kamchatka bay. The main idea of the "SeaSicknesses" was to match the largeness and greatness of the ocean with its cosmic rhythm of eternity, and a small human beings on the ship and around the ocean, fussy and busy with their minor problems. People (sailors, scientists and poachers) are present in the video as a voices only - they are reasoning, discussing, talking with each other about some simple things and sometimes questionable dealings  - and the ocean sounds and moves in shot itself. The ocean does not care about them and their business.

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MARGARITA NOVIKOVA