Please, see — slobtseva.com/culture-of-materials for more info

Animation fragment The Sky, 2020, after the drawing by L.Popov, looped video of 1min 20 sec

The series of animations was after the Soviet artist Leonid Popov and specifically his one drawing — Perm I, from his graphic series with realistic drawings of my native city Perm after WWII and how the city was changing, building anew, and showing the hopes for a bright communist future. I find this particular Leonid Popov’s drawing central to the series, as it shows a perspective movement from the past into the future, with the railroad and the oldest city-forming factory (Motovilikha factory) in the background. My project was an inquiry into and an attempt to draw connections between ways to make art throughout the 20th century and approaches to thinking about the city. The red square on Popov’s drawing below shows the fragment of the drawing that my animation is based upon. The animation is made with the help of software algorithms and numbers, the elements were added to reproduce Popov’s drawing just as well via algorithms. The staple stands as a metaphor for connections, also large metal staples were widely used during Soviet times (fast, time-saving construction of wooden barracks to provide accommodation to a lot of people after the war), plus a simple utilitarian metal shape was related to the avant-garde Russian-Soviet artists of the early 20-30s of the 20th centuries.