Project "THE DOCUMENT", participants of MoKS International Summer Arts Symposium PostsovkhoZ 4 –ISOLATION, Mooste, Estonia

I applied for this symposium searching the place for my next site-specific project. Evelyn Muursepp, participating organizer, proposed me to work with Estonian artist Peeter Krosmann in his house in Rasina village. I was pleased: I found the new authentic place, I will meet some new artists and I will cooperate with him…

Regarding the theme of PostsovkhoZ 4 – ISOLATION, Peeter and I created a very simple concept: We will live for a week in so-called isolation from the rest of symposium and develop our ideas in Rasina village (7 km East from Mooste). Our headquarter will be Peeters recently bought house; the only part left of the former Rasina manor, that was used as a shop until recently. The plan was: two isolated persons, with two different backgrounds, will share the same specific space and will be isolated for a week from the rest of the world… What ever turns out as a result, will be the document of this experience.

Before our meeting in Estonia Peeter and I had an active e-mail correspondence, we started our project before seeing each other ever in reality. It was the beginning of our communication, exchange of ideas and first creative interactions. We started to dream about our future presence in Rasina, about our isolated potent ional "paradise island" in which we will be happy and protected from our usual life, obligations, information, fears, noise … What is left from this phase are e-mail documents: letters, photographs and computer designed works.

The second part was our real presence in Rasina village. When we entered our isolated area – Rasina manor, we started to build a home for us, a pleasant surrounding for everyday living: we cleaned and explored the space, created the beds for us, the kitchen, comfortable living room space and leathers for the first floor. The house offered us a lot of memories and trails from the past presence, objects from the local store which was placed there for more than 50 years. A lot of them we used again, by putting them in some new concepts of our everyday living: we decorated the space with ready-made objects that we found; we used old store billets to make a protection from the flies on our main door… The house became our small playground or "wonderland kingdom", and we where we quite happy and peaceful in the fairytale which we constructed. It wasn’t a real noble castle but we felt there like we were living in a grand style, like landlord and landlady. Even if the fact was that we were living in the house that was built for servants in 1917. as a part of beautiful mansion of real landlord.

Peeter painted my portrait and I painted his. We put them in imaginary golden frames on the wall of our "lordly" living room. At the end of the week we invited the public to break our isolation. We offered to the visitors, for their impressions about our project, an old Soviet store book of complains. They all continued the tradition of writing a letters of thanks and gratitude. The installations that we exhibited in our "museum" were at the same time art works and simple documents of our everyday living and interactive presence in the Rasina manor, connected with all the past life of this space.

Once upon a time there was a manor, one Estonian artist from Tartu and one Serbian artist from Belgrade. Peeter had a tattoo in his hand; it was a rabbit from the fairytale "Alice in Wonderland"… (Svetlana Volic)

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