TURNING REEL AFTER THE FILM (Edt of 7)

Sergej Vutuc
TURNING REEL AFTER THE FILM (Edt of 7)

Photographs: Sergej Vutuc

Publisher: self published

156 pages

Year: 2021

Comments: Soft cover in a handmade box, 29x21cm, sewed, stapled, glued, mixed paper. Printed with stencil duplicator - copy machine - laser printer at à La Maison Printing. Edition of 7 signed by Sergej Vutuc.

The inception of this project lies in its author's natural reaction to the context of oppression, confusion and urgency the governmental restrictions coinciding with the Covid pandemic generally brought onto its contemporaries; whilst the world stopped and the people disconnected, Vutuc's vision was found in the idea of mentally escaping that claustrophobic frame by keeping creating towards an eventual exhibition, with no particular consideration for scheduling.

The process started through the research and organization of Vutuc’s personal work archive, finding temptation in looking back at a reassuring past, but mostly the drive to recognize its positives and the strength to take them forward - in spite of the dark, lobbyism-riddled given political settings. A society the blurry definition of which is only paralleled by Vutuc’s foggy aesthetic, and general symbolism that he highlights or injects via techniques normally pretending to be ones of representation: analog photography with subsequent film manipulation and scratching, laser printers, or dying copy machines spending their last moments marking the pieces with glitches, lines and tints and thus - denoting of both the strengths of their singularity in design and their weakness as they unavoidably succumb to its pattern.

The author recovered ancient photos going as far back as his formative years, including of Ukraine, Moscow and Chernobyl that, to this day, reinterpret and recontextualize themselves, revealing new dimensions of character and emphasizing on the multiplicity of « Čista Zona » as a regular context throughout space and time; vibrations of clean cut chaos in cycles that keep repeating and transcending themselves, now paralleling each additional layer of work with as many invitations to ponder reality. The resulting rhythm is sensorially matched by the one of the visual noise, with a particular proneness to spontaneous infection by red color: « simultaneously a call for revolutionary change, blood and - paradoxically - a symbol for stop », Vutuc says. Through the prism of skateboarding, Chernobyl in particular is represented as a playground amidst a global field of consumption, corruption and manipulation - all the while remaining a victim of the present consumerism, with its apparent logos and symbols. More generally, as they frenetically keep revealing themselves and progressively saturating their allocated space, the images can induce a trance reminiscent of one induced by raga or drone compositions. Eventually, shutting the object close concludes with the revelation of traces of a curtain, like a veil of abstract matter over the forerunning excerpts of cosmic mess one is bound to question the nature of: could it be iron? Could it be concrete? Could it be dust? Could it all be a reflection, or maybe a projection?