ARTEMIEV
STALKER|THE MIRROR

Skòpije in DOLGOPAX.
Chernobyl is Hiding in the Buildings Nowadays.

Svjatlana was born in Dolgopa in 1971. Her parents had filled her room with posters of the Party, Proletkult, and the Soviet. On the nightstand placed between two cots, instead of a lamp, they had placed a zinc statuette, a simulacrum of Marx and Engels. She grew up dazed by those symbols and wrapped in certain pedantries. Then came Chernobyl, Pripyat, the Zone of Alienation, the dead city, and the photo of that amusement park that her elders tried to make her ignore once seen, but that she could not get out of her head and of which she always found some reproduction from which she could never look away. Perestroika, Uskorenie, Glasnost, Marxist naiveties, the incoming news, the lies and betrayals of the people, the distortions. Outside, the Stasi, the DDR, the fall of the Wall, inside the disintegration of the Soviet Union, 1990. She hated indoctrination, ended up renouncing it entirely, and never spoke to her parents again. Moscow, the new, the Community of Independent States. Walewska. The broadcasts of Foreign Radios. Киев 1991.

A Reconnaissance in the Zone. The exploration of an abandoned factory. It is necessary to be attentive and choose your side. Feel its icy surfaces, graze the dust settled for a long time on the boilers, observe the steel pipes and follow their trajectories. Listen to the sound of droplets falling from the ceilings into wet areas, the faint sound eddies of stagnant waters stirred by your own steps. Let yourself be penetrated by the humidity of those echoes, down to the bones. Let yourself be charmed by those metallic silences, smell its matter, its residues. Imagine nothing but Notes of a Traveler in the Lands of Real Socialism. Immerse your arms in pools that were not believed to be so deep, search and then find fish still alive swimming inside them. A black factory, a dark place of history where in a dark corner you glimpse hope in the form of faint light filtering through the cracks of a blasted area. A place of the psyche where Geopolitics is not even hypothetical. A hope of which no one knows anything, a yearning in a place out of the world, far from it, of which the world itself does not notice and knows nothing.
There is a white light from the east that shines strong above these clouds on certain mornings.
Ice, oil stains, rare decibels, isolation in this Ministry of Winter.
Permafrost. An atheist thing, a private matter, the discipline of nothingness.

Eduard Artemiev is the intellectual author of this album, released by Мирумир in 2013 only on vinyl, which is nothing but the reduction of a previous compilation of tracks for Tarkovsky's Films re-sounded and recorded again in a studio in Amsterdam. The high quality of the music remains unchanged and immaculate, even though it is clearly a somewhat commercial operation for the spirit of collectors, whose purchase of the record is justified if only by the possibility of owning a cover-painting-frame of the director immortalized in a scene photo in the middle of the sand room of STALKER.

Sometimes, one should deactivate the speakers. The Consortium of Independent Musicians sang Production Unit in the stadiums and couldn't understand why among the audience five thousand people raised their fists. The concert ended, and the council acknowledged with sorrow that all those people hadn't understood anything. That is why sometimes you should turn off the record player, wait for it to rain, raise the shutters, and open the windows, enjoying the music of the rain beating on the terrace floor. Analog electronic music made of levers, buttons, synthesizers for a spiritual and austere cinema. The cross of Christ hanging on the wall of a church in Florence. Silence, organs, votive lights, and sorrow. Beatrix brings happiness, Andrej.
Artemiev. Wagner, Verdi, Debussy, Beethoven, candles lit in Bagno Vignoni.
War and Peace it already had in mind, already solemn, Tarkovsky's Nostalgia.

In 1994 Svjatlana moved to the Lungarno, near what was once the Via Cassia, to become a teacher. She bought herself a copy of Mein Kampf, La Lucciola Editrice edition, 1992. She let herself be seduced by the obscene charm of consumerism and spoke only of that. The university students from CSOA who bothered her by pointing out her distance from certain ideologies, despite her background, had to note that from neoliberalist ramblings she was quite capable of moving to much thicker and deeper reasoning, and when she began to talk about her childhood they shivered and ran out of topics from their repertoire. The ending was always the same: <<Marx is in the books>>. By the end of the '90s, she no longer spoke to anyone, remained silent at home. She listened only to minimal music and could spend hours without uttering a word watching her white cat eat from cans and drink from bowls on the floor. Her cat was named Zerkalo. She often observed her apartment window from the outside for a few minutes and then returned home. Dressed only in a white t-shirt one morning, she woke up, washed her face, combed her hair, and stared at herself in the mirror for hours. Memories of electric light and breathing between the anechoic snow. The wrinkles, the stretch marks, her story, her dissolution. The void. She smashed the mirror with a violent blow. She saw her image fragment within it. She knelt among its debris, began to eat the pieces, one by one. And thus she ate herself, slowly. At the funeral, only her twin sister Nastenka, who, after the burial, returned to Paris to think of a screenplay for all this, called it Matériel pour le Film.
In Bohemia, everything remains still. SAMIZDAT оповідання opovidannya DOLGOPAX.