In Macedonia, we often use the expression "лета од работа" which literally means “flying from his/her job”, when some person is losing their job; is being laid-off. Aleksey Shatalov - Ves, is one of the many who have lost their jobs after the fictional Ephemerki-made Kislovodsk Cosmodrome closed down in 2001 because of bankruptcy. His life story is in many aspects similar to our parents’ story, ours friends’ parents’ stories, and our enemies’ parents’ stories who have been losing jobs after the breakdown of Yugoslavia and the mass closure of its companies. A laid-off person is a person “floating on air”; someone who has entered a professional vacuum, often for a lifetime. In order to help our cosmonaut We took Deleuze and Guattari's notion of “line of flight”; an imaginary escape plan, the desire to be someone else, somewhere else. In this direction we asked, each of the people visiting to briefly become “The Laid-off Cosmonaut” and take Aleksey’s existential burden off his shoulders. Ves, who spends almost every day sitting in front of the closed buffet-door of the Kislovodsk Cosmodrome, eating a boiled egg with bukovec (local spice) and canned meat spam, is hoping that his protest will be seen and heard. The visitors of the exhibition stepped on Aleksey’s footprints, took a photo and posted it on the social media with the hashtag #kosmostecaj
Performative event Duration: opening hours of the exhibition place / Produced in 2014 |
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*The realization of this piece was partly supported by CAC (Skopje) and Atanas Botev from OGS, Skopje.
