DEGREES, ANGLES, RIPPED
PIECES OF PINK PYJAMAS (2021)

MULTICHANNEL VIDEO INSTALLATION
On a junction of theory and art practice, through the means of photography and moving image, this research, implemented in various artistic media, dives into the framework of contemporary affect theory and approaches the question of affect on personal, collective, and transitive levels. At every stage, the project is challenged to find artistic means of expression of the concept of affect, which is considered to be undetectable directly.
Following non-Cartesian tendencies in contemporary philosophy /merging the movements of matter with a processual incorporeality (Spinozism)/ and researching it in the interconnection with cultural and political studies, I'm experimenting with performative practices and detecting vague, diaphane disruptures of the visual reverberations to come up with a tangible notion of affect. I study affect in its autonomous bodily emanation, avoiding mixing it with emotions, which are defined as to be of the personal and subjective character. Being asocial, affect nevertheless includes social elements, but mixes them with elements belonging to other levels of functioning, and combines them according to a different logic. (Massumi 2015).

Past events can be conserved in the body and brain and repeated; they can be reactivated but not completed. This brings the concept of affect very close to the mechanism of traumatic recollection. Trauma (via Jean Laplanche) is defined as a failed translation of an unremembered experience. Moreover, trauma (via Cathy Caruth) is more than just a simple failure of translation; it is also the result of the perplexing condition of a missing original. (Baer 2002). The process of acting out can index another significant side of trauma theory: a repetition without knowledge of the source of the catalyst substituted for the memory, where the action itself might not even resemble the missing original (Ricoeur 2004).
Chapter I: FOUR
The early hours; not hot yet. Still tingly cool in the shade cast by fruit trees and hazel. I am enjoying the weather and the fact that my parents won’t be awake before noon. I am four: I get up before anyone else. Skipping my wash, I am slipping into the garden to chase little animals. Not to molest them – I am just curious to touch them. This is the thrill of the hunter. I am wild. I swing on mulberry branches. I eat from the trees and do not wash my hands. I wipe them against my garments. Mama hides my best dresses to save them from stains. I have proposed a universal solution: to remain in my underwear.
For some reason, this summer my Georgian grandfather is keeping four guard dogs in the courtyard. My grandfather is a man of business; a man of venture and bold endeavours. First, he built a new extension to establish a secret sewing workshop. And now – this.
Once a day, my grandfather feeds them milksop bread. This is an abhorrent greyish guck in the aluminium preserving pan, the one used for cooking plum jam. The guck is vanishing rapidly into the sharp-toothed maws. These dogs are constantly famished. They look at me, licking their chops. My parents are constantly nervous. So I visit the dogs in the mornings. I take the big aluminium pan and soak some bread in milk. The dogs are dying to get at it, tangling the rope leashes they are never let off. The dogs live under the stairs. I gaze with quiet satisfaction as the jaws slurp without chewing. They are gluttonous but still have protruding ribs.
Recently, the staircase has become a refuge for a new puppy. Granddad calls him Ingus. This is the only dog’s name he knows, so here, every dog ​​is called Ingus.
Ingus has a tight pinkish hairless tummy as if filled with water. Like it could burst if you pressed your fingers hard against it.
Adoration seizes me by the throat. I carry the puppy around in my arms like a baby. Soon these emotions are not enough; I need to find a reason to love this puppy even more. I start throwing it down the stairs from the top step. It hits against the ground painfully, rolls over several times, and again climbs the steps back to me. I rush to pity, caress, and kiss it. Then I throw it again. I am spurred on by an undefined burning thrill; my actions begin to obtain an adult meaning. This lasts for a month. Then I and my parents leave.
The first thing I do next summer is go searching for my puppy under the stairs, but I don't find it. I still envision it as tiny and pinkish tummies. I don't understand what I’m missing. I’m beginning to get upset, but I’m quickly distracted. I remember the next day, accompanying Mama to the market. “Where is Ingus?” I ask. Mama squeezes my hand tightly, and after a moment answers curtly: “Don't you know that he died?” She leaves a long and significant pause, letting me know that I am well aware of this fact, and it is foolish to play the innocent. I realise that my mother is right: I have to be an adult and take responsibility. At this moment, something in my stomach is pleasantly compressed and torn, as if my bladder turned out to be hanging by a single thread.
Video duration: 00:15:36
HD/ Colour/ Stereo
Performer: Guadalupe Aldrete
Idea and script: Ksenia Yurkova
Camera and editing: Ksenia Yurkova
Composer: Karina Kazaryan
Voice-over: Tiikka Järveläinen
Script Editor: Clair Le Couteur
Chapter II: FIVE
I am wandering through the courtyards. This is indeed my preferred season: Spring, with all these buds, new grass and beetles. It's probably already April. It smells like April.
I'm five. I have long red hair and a new leather headband. The scent is tart and bitter. It squeaks when you adjust it. And I am adjusting it constantly because it’s tight. It clenches my temples painfully; the entire head goes numb with pain. But I endure this because it's worth it. I am perfectly sure that they will envy me. They will ask me to demonstrate it again and again, they will begin to stroke with their awkward fingers along the leather folds. It's satisfying to gaze at; I keep doing it myself, all the time.
I am also wearing a chocolate-coloured pilot's jacket with a zipper decorated with a ring. It looks like a grenade pin. The jacket is a matter of special pride, mine and my father's. He gave it to me; not because of any important day, feast or holiday, but just like that. For such cases, he throws in a brief explanation: “From my patient.” This made him important and exclusive in my eyes.
Only because of this jacket, the kids from the yard next door do not beat me when I refuse to smoke with them. Not that I am not curious to try; I just do not see any particular reason for doing this for the first time yet. I have another way to earn attention. But also I'm a little scared.
Very warm and quiet, it smells of damp earth and sticky buds. I head to the next courtyard, where I cannot be spotted from the windows. I work my way along, crawling under the windows of the five-storey block over loose and sticky soil. It is black and springy. As if it is moving. It is utterly unpleasant to pick it up with the boot toe: earthworms are swarming in the ground, sometimes I see the coils of their backs. I stop and touch so that I can feel how bulky and viscid the soil is. I dig until my sneakers get wet.
In the next courtyard, one can see a one-storey kindergarten building under a flat roof. It’s emanating an indescribable mawkish kitchen odour: boiled cabbage, milky noodles and musty floor rags. It reminds me of what my mother’s worn bra smells like, which she sometimes leaves on the washing machine. Nauseatingly suffocating when you fill your lungs with it. Usually, I sniff it while sitting on the toilet for a long time, simultaneously staring at the intimidating black tiled opening beneath the bathtub.
Video duration: 00:13:12
HD/ Colour/ Stereo
Performer: Lau Lukkarila
Idea and script: Ksenia Yurkova
Camera and editing: Ksenia Yurkova
Composer: Artyom Slesarev
Voice-over: Tiikka Järveläinen
Script Editor: Clair Le Couteur
The first level of my research is a stage of individual perception, to which I relate personal memory, traumatic recollection and problems of identity construction. I aim to track down some fundamental regularities in biographies of unfamiliar contemporaries, revealed on their bodily level. What affects can unite the representatives of different languages, gender, economic, and social groups?
In the video work Degrees, Angles, Ripped Pieces of Pink Pyjamas (2021) first of all, I create a space of a patchwork narrative, describing individual unsettling/ disturbing/ traumatising life events; I push off the concept of place as a memory hub and move it to the field of outspoken. The narrative is built, so that speech can proximate the bodily inhabitancy of the event and cause an affect. I formulate a hypothesis – through the mechanism of affect transmission (Brennan 2014) – personal memory can be 'delegated' and 'lived out' by another person from a different domain of origin, language, and dwelling. To reveal it, I collaborate with professional performers. Through the method of creating collective assemblages (Braidotti 2011), I am pursuing to obtain a certain form of ethics of copresence.

A keyword for my research is resonance, entangled with the notion of affect: corporeal accommodation through an event, the details of which are becoming secondary to the experience of the body. Juxtaposing the straight reciting of my text clashing with a reenactment of a new memory, I want to cause resonance, which in the end can be detected by a third party, a spectator, who will simultaneously perceive gaps and vibrancy of two different narratives. A prerequisite for the project is the idea that the language used for describing past events is merely a construction: its primary goal is to arrange accents in favour of the narrator; to justify oneself presenting to the audience a whole, solid, enclosed form. As a fact, wholeness and enclosure by themselves can cause mistrust. Distancing from the linguistic representation of trauma, I want to detect its flip side – gap, interruption, pleasure, drive, transformation, identity flux. According to Massumi, language is not simply in opposition to affect. A linguistic expression can resonate with and amplify intensity at the price of making itself functionally redundant. (Massumi 1995; Massumi 2015).
Chapter III: EIGHT
I am woken in the middle of the night by the sound of my parents arguing. I am alone in a room of a one-bedroom apartment. I am eight years old. I see the moon in the window frame. I hear my parents' voices from the kitchen. The hushed voice of my mother asks to keep the noise down, my father yells that he should not be silenced.
I am lying down and looking at the greenish moonlight on the parquet floor. There is some unidentified object dappled in the light; I can't get what it is. Presumably a piece of cloth, but it smells like an animated body: smells like fear. My attention is absorbed; I stare at the object and begin to masturbate. I turn over to lie on my belly and turn my head to the window. I look at the object. I masturbate with both hands – not doing it properly, just squeezing the crotch. Soon, from exertion, I am sweating all over my body. I go on vigorously, thinking it could be a good excuse to enter the kitchen and claim I have a fever. I hesitate. Listening to my mother's voice, I understand that the object on the floor is a torn piece of her pyjamas. It begins to obtain shape and colour: pinkish with white flowers. “You raped me” – I hear her voice. “You have torn my pyjamas and raped me.” I dare to go into the kitchen, trying to look sleepy and innocent, and complain about the fever. The quarrel is interrupted; my father turns away from me to the window. I stand in the middle, barefoot, in my orange wet nightgown and look at my mother's tear-stained face. She quickly takes me to the bathroom, changes my clothes, puts me to bed. I ask her to stay longer, not to go back to the kitchen. I would repeat this tactic every time my parents fought.
Video duration: 00:20:58
HD/ Colour/ Stereo
Performer: Julia Hartig
Idea and script: Ksenia Yurkova
Camera and editing: Ksenia Yurkova
Composer: Artyom Slesarev
Voice-over: Tiikka Järveläinen
Script Editor: Clair Le Couteur
Chapter IV: TEN
Every morning at six o'clock I leave for the forest. I love these narrow long sunbeams, the scents, the absence of people who shout, curse and forbid. I am no longer a hunter, but rather imagine myself as an explorer. I move more carefully and attentively, I consider a lot, I step on the ground as quietly as possible. I'm ten years old. I go to the forest with an old dog: a brown shaggy royal poodle, which I do not like and sometimes even beat. I take him along because this way there won’t be complaints. I hate to touch him: he has some kind of wounds on his paws; he wears bandages with some very stinky cream. This odour is now spread all around the house. Like the smell of a dying man.
At night, the poodle licks its paws but then switches to licking its underbelly. The sound drives me crazy. I am sickened by the thought that this creature seeks to pursue pleasure. It is only me who needs, who deserves to get pleasure. One day, out of desperation, I throw a heavy log at the dog.
However, the poodle is a good excuse for my early departure. I pretend to care about him. We have put up with each other for many years. During a walk, he usually ranges a little ahead of me, stopping and checking if I am following. I think he still thinks he is doing me a favour. The rest of the time we do not interact and keep our distance. Everyone goes about their own business.
I like to climb a tree and sit there continuously while the dog staggers around somewhere below. This morning was hot, and I put on a dress. Now, as I descend from the pine tree, I catch on a twig with the elastic of my new white cotton underwear. They rip with an unpleasant snap and can no longer hold on to me, they can only be removed. I stand on the ground in confusion, holding up my underwear. Suddenly, I understand that there is something very shameful in the very fact of returning home with torn panties, but I do not understand what exactly. I cannot think of an excuse for this story. The idea of telling everything as it is seems unrealistic — they will immediately suspect something. This is not just a torn knee or a punctured tyre. It just doesn't happen to the right kids. I am very nervous, struggling with panic. I look for a place to get rid of the evidence of my fall. I am scared that the neighbours will notice. They will understand everything and immediately report it to my rigorous grandmother, who will not say a word while listening but will simply assume a very upright posture. Thus – expect trouble.
I choose a litter bin away from the house. I pull out the top layer of rubbish to conceal the knickers as deeply as possible. They are too white – they don't look like old ones. This is very suspicious. Of course, just because of this, they will find me. I rub dirt onto my panties. I bury them at the bottom of the bin. I turn to look at the dog. It looks the other way indifferently, leaving me with my troubles. Good, it can't speak. I don't have to threaten it.
Slowly, confidence comes back to me. The very thought of what happened makes me very mature. Experienced. Today I will definitely tell the boy – who, of course, is very pretty, with these white angelic curls, and who also trails after me very obsessively, just coming close and staring – that I don't like him. And I will add that I do not go out with boys whose mamas still dress them in the morning. I spotted this once, hanging out under his windows. Now, I will introduce him to an understanding of how shame feels.
Video duration: 00:13:20
HD/ Colour/ Stereo
Performer: Nora/Aaron Scherer
Idea and script: Ksenia Yurkova
Camera and editing: Ksenia Yurkova
Composer: Karina Kazaryan
Voice-over: Tiikka Järveläinen
Script Editor: Clair Le Couteur
Chapter V: SEVENTEEN
I'm seventeen and I'm sitting in a dirty country house sauna with two older guys and a younger girl. There are two spaces: a tiny changing room with a table, and a steam room with two shelves. Four people barely fit in the first one, and only two can get to sweat at once.
I wasn't going to be here. I feel sick, but I endure it to carry out a plan I have conceived.
We sit naked; everyone is eating smoked sausage, dried fish and drinking beer. I fiddle with a piece of bread, then stuff it into my mouth and chew so as not to arouse suspicion. Some criminal chanson plays on the tape recorder. Familiar plots about good thieves and bad cops. No, this is not serious. This is a subtle, intellectual subversive humour. Everyone is older than me and everyone attends good universities. They like to savour low culture. Everyone is having fun. I don't understand the reason for the fun, but I try to play along.
It comes to my turn to go to the steam room. I allow myself to be persuaded by one of the guys, letting him accompany me, and even rub my back. Two weeks earlier, he had raped me after I fell asleep; I’d had a bottle of wine and two joints on an empty stomach in a barn behind his mate’s house. I have come back for revenge. But I have no plan. I try to navigate according to circumstance, meanwhile, I just play along, I let him rub my back, but I don’t let myself be touched. I'm starting to guess that everything that exists in my head as a plan is – in his eyes – a flirtation and an invitation to continue. My attempts to verbally insult the rapist remain innocent, and only fuel the game. I leave with nothing, lost and devastated. My rapist calls me two weeks later, inviting me to have coffee together.
Video duration: 00:08:05
HD/ Colour/ Stereo
Performer: Nadja Pärssinen
Idea and script: Ksenia Yurkova
Camera and editing: Ksenia Yurkova
Composer: Karina Kazaryan
Voice-over: Tiikka Järveläinen
Script Editor: Clair Le Couteur
Chapter V: TWENTY SIX
My mother is lying in bed on a sagging mattress. A compress on her forehead, a cat on her feet. Mother has not got up for two months. I come to her often to relieve the nurse but never stay overnight. I am 26. I'm scared. I cook food, wash and change clothes. I think that it should not be the case that children have to feed their parents with a spoon – there is some kind of misstep in the world order.
It's early spring, but I have hunted down fresh raspberries from somewhere: proudly bringing them, mixing them with cream and sugar, spoon-feeding them. But my mother’s facial expression never changes.
The only sensation she has is pain. She moans when I touch her feet. I don’t know how to do it so as not to cause torment. It seems that it is not the disease, but me – the cause of this pain. Just like in childhood: my mother complained every time I touched her. When I took her hand, she told me that it felt like I was taking off her skin.
This is my first night in her apartment. I stay in the next room. I am terrified to fall asleep, and even worse is to wake up and find... Not to find. It's already 10 am. I have to come to see her, but I don’t want to enter her room. I sit on a dusty rug in the corridor, in front of a closed door, and look at the slit of light beneath. Listening, trying to catch something. When I dare to open it, I see that she is sleeping. Her cat, as always, curled up at her feet. A little respite and a little relief. There is still some time, and I have to occupy myself.
I start to think about how different artists took pictures of their dying or dead parents. Of the open mouths of their graves. And then published, exhibited, presented. I also want to be an artist in any situation. Over any situation. The appeal of this profession is the ability to subdue everyday life. I grab my camera and take one shot. On it, part of a leg and a cat that looks at me point-blank. A table with medication. Old dilapidated furniture. A broken lamp with a plastic shade. Window glass that no one has washed. The river and the ugly cathedral, which I have always called anencephalous. Her face – not visible, only a compress on the forehead.
Then I feel ashamed. For the desire to be out of this situation. For thinking about a possible life. For wanting a good shot. For dirty windows.
I go to another room and lie down for another hour. An hour later I come back; my mother has already woken up. When she wakes up, she does not recognize me. She orders me to leave the room. Why? “Because you are not human.” What then? “Barley porridge.”
Video duration: 00:14:16
HD/ Colour/ Stereo
Performer: Mads Anderson
Idea and script: Ksenia Yurkova
Camera and editing: Ksenia Yurkova
Composer: Karina Kazaryan
Voice-over: Tiikka Järveläinen
Script Editor: Clair Le Couteur
Chapter VII: THIRTY THREE
I'm watching the director's cut of Nymphomaniac by Lars von Trier. Before this, I had only watched the version screened in the cinema. I remember that afterwards, I cried. But I can weep even after Anna Karenina. And then, of course, I feel ashamed that I agree so easily to manipulations. In principle, Nymphomaniac is a comedy, and I need to watch it this time to have a good laugh.
I am 33 years old. I live abroad, in an apartment with a dog and my son. I am at home alone, my laptop is on the kitchen table. I am fixing my coffee and doing my nails at the same time. There is a scene with a self-abortion on the screen. The heroine lies on her back, legs raised, and tries to shove a knitting needle into her vagina. Everything is in dirty yellow-green tones. I do not have a single emotion, but feel slightly dizzy. I can sense the chill and shiver of my gums. I can feel the blood ebbing from my limbs. I need to wash my face. I proceed to the toilet.
After a moment, I find myself on the floor. I must have passed out. Still no emotion. Everything feels smooth, just some slight surprise bothers me. My consciousness is not yet fully in the body. It feels familiar; it happened to me once, a long time ago. It is urgent to recall. I consider this a key.
I go back to the kitchen, turn off my laptop, and force myself to go over all the episodes of fainting in my memory. Attention dwells on one of them. It is the brightest but suppressed a long time ago. I am eighteen. I am expecting a child, I argue with my partner. We hate each other for being trapped together. Each time, our mutual accusations are more and more explicit. We test the limits of the possible. It's like we're both examining our lives for the irreparable. In the end, he tells me that he will wait for the baby to be born and immediately take it away. It would be very easy to prove to the court that I cannot be left unattended, that I am incapable, and more like a parasite than a mother. I turn to leave the room and pass out. For about half a second. At that moment, even I believed that was it. On the other hand, I remember that I fell on my side very deliberately.
Video duration: 00:07:04
HD/ Colour/ Stereo
Performer: India De Vere
Idea and script: Ksenia Yurkova
Camera and editing: Ksenia Yurkova
Composer: Artyom Slesarev
Voice-over: Tiikka Järveläinen
Script Editor: Clair Le Couteur