June 8, 2008
Yekaterinburg, Russia
A one-day photo marathon through Yekaterinburg.
Each participant chose one colour and photographed it while following a shared route through the city. The participants walked together, but each followed their own colour.
The photographs were later collected and organised according to colour.
Participants: Elena Gladysheva, Viktor Oborotistov, Vladimir Romanov, Dmitry Razhev, Marina Razheva.
Captured trophies:
Black / White
Red
Green
Yellow
Blue
2008 | Exhibition / performance
Venue: ParaRam Gallery, Yekaterinburg, Russia
Dates: 30 April – 5 May 2008
Occasion: 3.5th anniversary of Kazimir Malevich’s Malers’ Brigade
Group: Kazimir Malevich’s Malers’ Brigade
By spring 2008, the Brigade had been working together for three and a half years. To mark the occasion, the members turned their own history into an exhibition, performance and self-portrait of the group.
The title, Spring Glitch, or an Attack of MALERia, deliberately mixes several associations: glitch, cranberry, happiness, painter and malaria. The wordplay belongs to the Brigade’s own language, where ordinary words, borrowed meanings and accidental associations become material for action.
During the preparation, the Brigade produced its April Theses, a four-handed portrait of “Someone’s Name”, a slide film and photographic compilation of its previous actions, as well as a collection of apocrypha, jokes and popular sayings about painters and Malevich.
For the exhibition, the Brigade also changed its everyday uniform — black polyethylene bags — for white non-woven garments.
The exhibition presented different “themes from the life of the Brigade”: travel, photographs, paintings, seasons, memories and stories from its previous actions.
It also included a retrospective of the Brigade’s activity and a collective staging of Chekhov’s The Seagull, based on a libretto by Viktor Oborotistov.
The result was not simply an anniversary exhibition. The Brigade turned its own history into material for a new collective work.
It documented itself, invented its own mythology and performed its own identity.
The project was created by an open group whose members maintained their individual artistic practices while working together as the Brigade.
The April Theses described this principle:
“Each of us is an individualist in our artistic practice. But within the Brigade, we become a single organism.”
By 2008, the Brigade had begun to treat not only objects and spaces, but its own collective existence as material for artistic action.
The project was realised collectively by Elena Gladysheva, Viktor Oborotistov, Marina Razheva and Vladimir Romanov.
A Virtual and Contemplative Instrument for Listening to the City
PanGorMonium: Yekaterinburg is a work conceived as a virtual instrument for experiencing the city through attentive presence, memory, and inner listening.
The work was first presented on 12 September 2008 at Gallery ParaRam, Yekaterinburg, as part of the international group exhibition Enstruments, within the Finnish–Russian festival Together: Ecology of Space.
Physical work: photography, toned paper, collage
Dimensions: 1682 × 1188 mm
PanGorMonium does not produce sound in the conventional sense.
Its body is the city itself.
Architecture, infrastructure, memories, absences, everyday details, forgotten traces, and personal associations become elements of an invisible instrument.
Each person assembles this instrument differently.
For one, it may be a railway station, a bridge, a factory, or a monument. For another, a courtyard, a staircase, an old tree, a demolished house remembered from childhood, or the rhythm of a familiar walk.
The instrument has no fixed form. It exists in the attentive encounter between a person and a place.
PanGorMonium is played not by action, but by attunement.
Listening becomes a creative act. Perception becomes performance.
The participant is both listener and performer, while the city becomes both instrument and score.
There is no external audience.
The experience unfolds inwardly, where individual acts of listening may sometimes resonate with one another — in harmony or dissonance — forming a temporary and invisible orchestra.
The work is not about hearing the city as sound.
It is about sensing what the city can make audible within us.
PanGorMonium can unfold through different layers of urban experience. They are not fixed categories, but overlapping fields through which a city may begin to resonate.
Cultural
Architecture, monuments, public spaces, rituals, symbols, and collective memory.
Industrial
Factories, transport systems, infrastructure, construction, technical structures, and the material processes that shape the city.
Everyday
Courtyards, passages, walls, vegetation, handwritten signs, routines, sounds, and details that usually remain unnoticed.
Absent
Demolished buildings, erased landscapes, vanished places, forgotten names, and things that survive only through memory.
These layers can overlap, contradict one another, or remain barely perceptible. Their combination is different for every listener.
PanGorMonium is an artist-constructed word that intentionally resists a single definition.
Its associations include Pan, suggesting wholeness; hormao, evoking movement and activation; harmony, suggesting resonance; and monos, pointing toward the singularity of individual perception.
These meanings do not form a strict etymology. They coexist as resonances within the title, reflecting the layered and polyphonic nature of the city.
PanGorMonium: Yekaterinburg became the starting point for Anatomy of Cities, an ongoing R² research into urban environments through attention, memory, movement, colour, and listening.
Each new city can become a different instrument, shaped by its own material history, rhythms, absences, and emotional geography.
PanGorMonium: Budapest is currently developing as a new study within this ongoing research. it.