Easy / Легко
Easy / Легко is a bilingual artist’s book and a collection of fairy tales, illustrated with drawings from my works. The book is built as a sequence of strange, dark, almost childlike stories about flight, machines, death, memory, weakness, and the fragile possibility of a future. It was created as part of my exhibition project Easy. The book was presented within the Take-Off Project / ВЗЛЁТ in Moscow, curated by Sergey Popov.
The drawings become illustrations to a separate literary world, where airplanes, military vehicles, dead bodies, sleeping figures, and anonymous landscapes turn into characters and narrative forces. The texts move between fairy tale, political allegory, lullaby, trauma narrative, and absurd philosophical reflection.
The book opens with the idea that catastrophe is possible only on the ground. Flight appears as a temporary liberation from gravity, from history, from impact, and from the density of the earth. At the same time, this lightness is unstable: every take-off contains the possibility of falling, and every dream of freedom is shadowed by disaster.
The first tale, Military Vehicles, imagines military machines as traumatized beings trapped inside systems of command, obedience, exploitation, and violence. They want to become free, but their very bodies have been designed for war. To be liberated, they would have to escape not only their owners, but also the purpose built into them.
The second tale, A Dead Heap, describes an unnamed place where the dead are held hostage by history. Their bodies merge into one mass, becoming an anthropogenic landscape, almost invisible from close up. The story speaks about historical violence, mass death, repression, and the impossibility of separating individual lives from the collective heap into which they have been forced.
The third tale, Ivan Ignatyevich, takes the form of a terrifying lullaby and a dream inside an airplane. A man becomes a child, then an adult again, surrounded by dead infants whom he tries to protect. The story connects sleep, care, death, helplessness, and the desire to let the dead rest peacefully.
For me, Easy is a book about lightness that is never innocent. It uses the form of fairy tales to speak about war, trauma, historical memory, and vulnerability. Its bilingual structure creates a double movement: the stories exist between Russian and English, between local memory and a wider language of catastrophe. The book asks whether one can still imagine flight, tenderness, or a future after violence has already entered the body, the landscape, and the language itself.
2018