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PUNCTATION, INDEPENDENT ARTIST AND CURATORIAL COLLECTIVE

GREEN CORRIDOR

(Saint Petersburg, Russia)

 

For many people, not being able to travel during quarantine has itself become an adventure into unexplored memories, sensations, archives, and routes of new relationships within a 100-yard radius of their apartment buildings. Many found new data to study in digital archives, their own and others’, and new paths to travel in the heretofore unnoticed grounds in and around their homes. First-floor cafes, playgrounds, the bus stop-places you frequent everyday share in the building’s aura, but are now technically “outside”, and they take on the characteristics of public and private space simultaneously. Social media profiles undergo a similar hybridization of private and public: united by personal memories, but still public, they become a gateway between the private and the public, a corridor between open and closed borders. We might term these spaces – social media and the areas around our buildings – a “green corridor,” a place where people move from being a host to being a guest. [Translator’s note: readers who have visited Russia will recognize the “green corridor” as the name of the nothing-to-declare line at Russian customs.]  For one of the artists in the Punctuation collective, the café in her apartment building became this kind of green corridor and her friendship with the café’s Serbian owner, a godsend. The exchange of opinions and resources, neighborly initiatives and mutual support, as well as changes in perception of a familiar place’s function and characteristics, became major discoveries without having to physically travel far.  The artists in the Punctuation group invite you to share this experience through the exhibition space they have set up for the length of the festival in collaboration with Emil, the café owner.

 

The café windows and a flat-screen TV inside will display videos of private/public recollections of travelling, understood broadly, made by artists, curators, friends of the artists, and other travelers

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