Za-project

Velimir Khlebnikov (1885-1922) is the greatest but probably the most obscurely known poet of Russian Futurism. He was the most seminal thinker of early 20th century Russian art.

The ZA-PROEKT (Za-project) (1) takes as its matrix one of Khlebnikov’s early plays, MARKIZA DEZES (The Marquis Des S), written at the end of 1909. The text will function as an instrument of empowerment rather than a constraint or prescription. One of the ZA-PROJECT’s endpoints will be an exhibition of artworks (paintings, sculptures, installations, photographic works, performances). These develop concepts or images thinkable within or beyond the play’s frame of reference. This will be creatively embodied in performances of MARKIZA DEZES which will take place in the exhibition space.

The play is a microcosmic miniature. It represents a series of conversations and events occurring at the private view of an art exhibition. It proposes a number of imaginative and conceptual leaps: the work of art’s experience of being looked at, the conversion of the art public into the works it consumes, organic nature’s refusal to continue existing as the vehicle of human desire. Also a mathematician, Khlebnikov’s mind and spirit moved easily through domains in which the real (2) was just one axis of a multidimensional space of possibility (futurity).

The works on show are ideologically and spiritually freestanding. They are in no way illustrative, but utter the absences which are the text’s interstices. The theatre likewise does not represent the text but realizes its physicality. The performance is a mirage or simulacrum, the spectral ancestor of the “real”, actual event taking place on the 4th, 11th and 13th January. The idea is that the space of the event will be charged: the exhibition perhaps will dissolve into theatre, the theatre will be the penumbra of a space inhabited by works, people and discourses. This is a non-linear project.

1. ZA is a Russian preposition and verbal prefix. It emphasises limits and boundaries and the traffic across them. It can mean ‘beyond’, ‘across’, ‘the other side off’, also ‘on behalf of’, ‘in exchange for’, in relation both to objects and actions. For Khlebnikov it signified the supersession of linear ways of thinking and also the construction of multilinear texts. 2. c.f the well known situationist slogan: ‘Soyez realistes, pensez l’impossible.’ The opposition REAL/IMAGINARY was conceived in mathematical terms by Khlebnikov.

Za-project