In 2024, I made the film MONUMENTOMANIA about how military monuments make war possible by glorifying militarism and manipulating collective memory. PLASTIC MEMORIES / IGRUSHKI is a series of sculptures that continues my visual exploration of monumentalism.

In this series, we catch monuments at the moment of collapse and awkwardness: they deflate, melt, are crushed; verticality and upward striving are replaced by voguing-like plasticity, the solidity of stone/metal—by the flexibility of punctured, dismembered plastic/rubber. Some of them are ridiculous and fancy, others are beautiful—like the beauty of demise, or the toppling of a tyrant’s statue, freeing space for community. Their poses are choreographic and unstable, reflecting how, by the late 20th century, street performance in public spaces had begun to replace monumentalism and massive stones. Homoeroticism—immanent rather than imposed in military visuality—adds to the disruption of the cringe masculine drive transmitted by monuments.

PLASTIC MEMORIES / IGRUSHKI is both a critique of monumentalism and militarism, a version of what monuments should be, and a reminder that, actually, cities do just fine without them. Monumentalism discredited itself in the last century, and art—both static and relational—functions perfectly well as points of urban attraction. The monuments have fallen; this series invites us to imagine—what comes next?