Staples, 2014
Stop motion and video, 1920×1080, sound, duration — 7:05, single channel or 12-channel video
“Slobtseva uses [staples]… to create a variety of complex objects and images. The staples bring things together and hold them apart, start wars and make peace, grow through surfaces and die. At times, they are moved like human populations displaced by conflict, or fall apart like dead organic matter. They may represent painful historical ruptures or human relationships, but often they are nothing but building blocks for visual signs on a blank surface, Slobtseva’s universal soldiers take part in geopolitical games and social critique, assembled into moving objects that visualize the ‘spiritual bonds’, from the speech by Russian President Vladimir Putin, in her video From the Life of Staples (2014).” — Sasha Obukhova, for Garage triennial of Russian contemporary art, 2017
The narrative on the life of staples was implicitly motivated by political and social issues of the time — the 2011–2013 Russian protests, which some English language media referred to as the Snow Revolution, the Maidan revolution in Ukraine in 2014, and 2014 the so-called 'Crimean problem' and its consequences. The video consists of 10 fragments and an epilogue, there are two options for an exhibition — on separate screens with looped fragments, and on one screen, as it was done in GROUND Peschanaya, in Moscow, 2017.
