Visualising My Studio

I started this task with physical work. But in the process of working on this hard and big work, I realized that my essence strives to be independent of anything material.

This is caused by my memories of several significant breaks in my life when I was left with essentially one bag of things in my hands after many years. At that moment, I learned to appreciate and cherish only what is inside of me. All value is within a person. In my opinion, this is knowledge, skills, and the ability to feel and perceive deeply and multifacetedly.

For me, the place of work is more of an internal state. Yes, of course, I need (do I really need all of this?) tools, paints and materials I collected for work, but I need all this insofar as. I understand that if I need to work in another place, I will find all these materials or something similar in the same way, the only important thing will be me and my creative state for the artwork itself.

I had the experience two years ago, when I last went home to Moscow, to create my works. I just went to the store and bought two types of liquid paints, and two jars of spray paint, and my mother collects old newspapers for me. As a basis, I used one of the canvases that I painted at the institute. That's all. This experience confirmed my idea of lightness and not being attached to anything physical.

And then it struck me that my work is the complete opposite of what I really feel. The objects I create are very tactile, very material and ask for space. Again some kind of contradiction. I don't value anything material, but at the same time, I create something extremely physical. Is this a psychology again?! The trauma of losing everything provokes denial, but probably, I really want it...

And yet, these thoughts got me thinking that I don't want to think of my studio as a physical place. I thought that I wanted to represent it as a place of mental state. For instance, Plato simply came to a person and placed him in a state of an imaginary world where he set up experiments and solved problems. The Myth of the Cave. At OCA, I have been working on analysing this myth at the beginning of the course on "Understanding Visual Culture". https://www.marinawittemann.com/post/whether-and-why-the-allegory-of-the-cave-valid-today In October 2019, I came to the conclusion that the dominant people over the masses are SUGARing our thoughts in such a way that we sit in front of the TV and absorb the content that they give us. Lately, I’ve been thinking more and more often about how similar this is to what’s happening in my country right now. At the same time, again, in my last essay, “Contemporary Art, Killing The Inner Fascist,” from 2023 https://www.marinawittemann.com/post/critical-review-contemporary-art-killing-the-inner-fascist I analysed in detail the fact that the culture in which I grew up contains clear signs of fascism. All these thoughts led me to the representation of my studio as a concept - an allegory of the artist's work.

I based it on the Myth of the Cave and enlarged the cave to the size of a country; the shadows on the wall became news on a television or smartphone; the light from the fire became light from the screen. This whole story is exactly what i´m trying to do in my studio.

Bibliography and references

1. Plato, Book VII of The Republic, The Allegory of the Cave [online] At: http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/platoscave.html (Accessed on 21.11.23)