TITLE: PANDEMIC CHRONOTOPE / THE FIREBIRD FAIRY-TALE
GENERAL INFO: online collective fairy-tale writing
TECHNICAL INFO: website, prints 20 x 30 cm, 15 x 15 cm, dibond 3 mm, HD video, duration 15'32"
GENERAL INFO: within the project «World Wide Window» by Mikki Nordman commissioned by The Finnish Cultural and Academic Institutes for their Together Alone program
PLACES: 1. HSE ONLINE GALLERY / online
2.LADO bar / Moscow, RU

The website set an experiment of a collective fairy tale writing expressing an experience of COVID-19 isolation in Russia. The story is written based on submissions and updated every Sunday from 01.06.20 till 01.09.20. Submissions were intertwined in 10 chapters and as a final result put into a 15 min animated video.

The situation with COVID-19 produced a lot of uncertainties and myths from the virus origin to the forecasts about new order of public space and the rules of social behaviour. An ambiguity begot the need of a theoretical description of the world structure because human by its nature cannot deal with undefined world.

Fairy tales, above all, functioned as a certain time representation of the life's arrangement. In the fairy-tale core there is always a strict devision of the world on 'mine' — the safe one, and 'foreign' laying at the threshold of the house and foreboding a danger and adventures. The 'foreign' one is a place where the story character is sent with mission to get and deliver special substance. Today COVID-19 impacts formed similar perception of the «my» «safe» home and potentially dangerous «outside», where from time to time we need to go with special task.

The project took the fairy-tales' plot scheme of «challenges beyond the threshold» in order to depict an «outside» home world in Russia during pandemic.