I’ll leave you to enjoy an excellent vintage, in the comorbidity of psychiatric disorders genre. This is Mr Piotr Pavlenski, a renowned Russian artivist who explains his approach like this:
First, I want to show everyone the
possibility and ease of activism.
Your raw materials can be anything from household appliances to your own body – you don’t need money to make an activist statement. You just need a little motivation and a willingness to overcome the phobias imposed by power. Then, actions lead people to react and criticize. Call it a social reflex, if you like. They question what’s going on and realize the power of the propaganda imposed by totalitarian ideologies.” Then his collector’s series of outrageous performances: setting fire to the gates of the “Lubyanka”, the historic headquarters of the KGB, sewing his lips shut to protest the incarceration of the Pussy Riots, wrapping himself naked in barbed wire in St. Petersburg and, above all, nailing his testicles between the cobblestones of Red Square in Moscow.
Did you understand the connection between nailed testicles, sewn mouths, barbed wire and freedom of expression? I do. This is the melancholy of decline expressed, with courage, in all its madness, and so much the better! Tomorrow belongs to us.
