TRAVELING IN RUSSIA
KIEV
18:25. Maidan Nezalezhnosti. Above the elaborate fountain installation, a massive stage is set up where a folklore program of questionable nature is being played out. The entire square is filled with sound at a volume bordering on painful. Choirs in all sorts of costumes form, including those in church uniforms. We turn away in bewilderment and walk back to Andreevsky Spusk. There, thousands of people move down towards Podil or in the opposite direction. Hundreds of artists, artisans, kitsch painters, etc., display their works in this alley. In the middle of this hustle, a performance artist has marked off an area using various scrap metal like stove pipes, tin cans, plastic ruins, and glass bottles. From time to time, he breaks away from this base camp into the crowd and pulls the stove pipes, tin cans, and glass bottles behind him over the cobblestones by a string. Later, I see him carrying his equipment into a house. We start a conversation but cannot communicate because we speak different languages. He, or was it me, approaches two young women passing by to ask if they could translate. Then a friend of his, a photographer, joins us. Fedir Tetyanich, the performer, invites us to his studio. We walk towards Khreshchatyk, buy some bottles of Moldovan wine at a kiosk, and then dive into an endless crowd gathered that evening on Khreshchatyk Boulevard. For a while, we move with the flow and then turn into a side alley where the chaotic studio of the artist is located in a dilapidated building.
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Bibliography:
TRAVELING IN RUSSIA. KIEV [Electronic resource] – Access mode to the resource: http://www.backwood.at/Kiev.htm.
