Thursday, December 12

I spent the afternoon working with some students on the final stages of their CMS project. The last hour proved fascinating as Becca, an IT student, and I thought through some complex logic and came up with a rock-solid solution that she promised to implement over the weekend. It involved completely rethinking and then redefining the problem.

Now I have raced to Stoa for the opening of an art project called Valentina Kozinets – The Letter D . Those responsible describe it this:

In summer 2018, the SASHAPASHA duo joined a folklore expedition to the Arkhangelsk region of Russia, organised by Saint Petersburg State University and the non-profit organization “The Propp Centre for Humanities-based research in the Sphere of Traditional Culture”. In the village of Sovpolye, they found an unusual-looking bathhouse that had served as the home of Valentina Kozinets, an outsider artist who died in 2016. There were lots of paintings and notebooks inside the home, and the members of the expedition found out that the works were doomed to be thrown away. Wanting to preserve the artist’s heritage, they took the finds with them.

As part of the project, the artists are raising a whole range of questions about anthropological and folkloric research, copyright and appropriation, inheritance of personal and public property, and personal and public memory. The main goal is to give a voice to an outsider artist whose art was not appreciated by society and to use the exhibitions and duo’s artistic name as a platform for that.

The artistic duo was created in 2009 in St Petersburg by Sasha (born 1985) and Pavel Rotts (born 1982). They live and work in Helsinki, Finland.

The whole exhibition appears in this photo, which I took from a balcony. I have nothing more to add.