Project Common Decision
Curated by Andrey Syaylev


STAY IN THIS GRASS

Hotel Green is a hotel for things left behind by humans. It is now inhabited by plants -- the green masters of fields, vacant spaces, and ruins.

The discarded and re-collected objects, freed from the onus of utility, have now made some new friends. The randomness and discord of a landfill has been recast into poetic harmony.

A rusty bicycle skeleton is transformed with desolation-seeking wormwood.

A petrified felt boot-turned-insect colony – with tangled creeper stems.

A cracked wooden cart wheel – with hostile, stinging nettle cilia.

Carcasses of carved window casings covered in scales of peeling paint – with crafty offshoots of ivy.

The soot and patina of stove tiles – with creeping couch grass, the fire of the fields.

A mailbox inscribed "for letters and newspapers" – with caustic, Mesozoic cow parsnip.

A fabric-upholstered door that time and local cats have reduced to a misshapen palimpsest – with tremulous, pervasive dandelions.

A typewriter, its letters inextricably lumped together by corrosion – with fractal ferns.

The derelict household items have lost their erstwhile faces, yet refuse to die, commencing a new lifecycle instead. The human experience still lingers in them, but it no longer reaches out to humans.

The old carcasses are covered with budding and blossoming sprouts of a new spring.


Konstantin Zatsepin


In Hotel Green, curator Andrei Syailev, together with the Tom Sawyer Fest community, carries on his practice of re-designating and re-contextualizing artifacts of the human environment along the lines of interspecific relations.

The project provides a collective co-creative platform for volunteers from different parts of the country. They first went out to collect all manner of artifacts, the debris of urban and rural life -- old, decrepit household items with a site-specificity of their own. Next they collected different kinds of plants.

During the final, exhibition phase, the participants set up a pavilion combining the characteristics of a symbolic structure and a "total" installation. It was unanimously decided that the structure would serve, functionally and in appearance, as a plant hotel in the process of continuous rejuvenation.

This is a symbolic intervention in the life of diverse "communities of objects". The project makes it possible for them to exist and be perceived in a new, artistic capacity. The old items shed both their former utilitarian function in the human realm and their role as "garbage". They are re-launched into a new lifecycle. Hotel Green and its plant guests emerge as a metaphor of rejuvenated existence in the same way that the Tom Sawyer Fest team members breathe life into historic buildings when they restore them.