The Wall

Since the 26th of March, the Ministry of Emergency Situations (MES) has been regularly informing me about the quarantine, the first infected ones, the first victims. Text messages add up to a sequence of numbers and requests and gradually become part of my story about the pandemic. It began in mid-March in Berlin, when the exhibition and museum sites were already closed, and I walked dozens of kilometers according to guidebooks and determined my location relative to the Berlin Wall. I was reading about the divided city and I was building my own wall. I controlled the movement of my hands, trying not to touch anything, carefully adjusted my glasses and followed social distancing  rules. I brought the wall home. During the two-week quarantine, I kept methodically building it in my apartment. I stretched it along my way to work and back, around the office, around the workplace. I have a solid, high, blank wall. But – who knows? – maybe some artists cover the other side of it with graffiti and passers-by kiss on its background.

August 2020
Vologda, RU