The work emerges from a sharp sense of vulnerability and becomes a reaction to the news of the demolition of the CTSI «Fabrika.» «Jungle» in the exhibition title refers to the environment of freedom and spontaneity that is lost along with the building. The installation translates this loss into the embodied experience of a person whose personal space is compressed to a minimum by the city.
There is no open manifesto here. The object chooses protection: to retreat into the architectural underground, into its own cocoon. It deliberately avoids the most prominent spots in the CTSI «Fabrika» Assembly Hall, turning a scar-like niche on the wall into a forced sanctuary.
Space within the main auditorium of the Factory Creative Technology Institute // Visualization of an installation in space using Recraft AI
The suspended cocoon is constructed from a wireframe wrapped in a multi-layered tracing paper. The tracing paper features monochromatic graphics of faceless skyscrapers. This symbolic commercial city rests directly on the «skin» of the installation, compressing it from the outside. Concealed beneath the layers of tracing paper is an anthropomorphic figure in a fetal position (detail in the attached photo). This is a radical attempt to preserve the remnants of subjectivity and personal memory when the external space has been entirely expropriated.
This gesture echoes Michel Foucault’s heterotopia: a real space that reflects the rest of the world, challenges it, and turns it upside down by living by its own rules.
«The Factory» long served as a macro-heterotopia within the body of Moscow—a vast space of cultural resistance. When it is destroyed, the installation becomes a micro-heterotopia, a tiny island of freedom coiled inside a condemned hall. The fragile shell tears under the strain, yet it retains its form. The cocoon functions as a «bubble, ” in which the silence, suspended just before the walls collapse, is preserved.
Installation Technical Specifications
Dimensions:
35 × 30 × 120 cm.
Materials:
Wire frame, multi-layered translucent vellum, original graphic design in alcohol markers, miniature anthropomorphic figure (modeling clay), suspension system.Photo: installation mock-up
Urban Installation
Urban Installation
Close-up of a detail from the finished installation