Art activist Catherine Nenasheva about favorite books
IN BACKGROUND "BOOK SHELF" we ask journalists, writers, scholars, curators, and other heroines about their literary preferences and publications, which occupy an important place in their bookcase. Today, Catherine Nenasheva, an artist and participant in the Russia Sitting charity project helping convicts and their families, shares her stories about favorite books.
Our family did not have any particular reading culture. In Krasnodar, where I was born and went to school, until the end of zero everything was very bad with bookstores and modern editions. The need for reading began to appear before my graduation. I think it was some form of local protest, because it was completely unfashionable, and my classmates had an unloved subject for literature. I began to actively read after I came to study in Moscow, and I sharply discovered for myself some absolutely new layer of culture: exhibitions, performances and creative meetings. There was a period when I was buying manic publications of UFOs, Ad Marginem and Garage, simply because I had never seen such books before. These wanted to touch, smell, carry in bags and bags.
Now I have a small library: because of the moves, there is nowhere to store books and a bookshelf, I rather reduced it to a set of artifacts. My attitude to the book as an object and to the process of reading itself is constantly changing, it is situational, like a performance. Today, publications for me are the guardians of the event, which is often expressed in torn pages or soiled, painted covers. For the last year and a half I have been buying catalogs or thick magazines. From the latter - a black and white brochure A5, a manifesto of neoacademism by Timur Novikov. The most important place for me where I ever found a book was the Borey-Art Gallery's shop in Liteiny in St. Petersburg: dusty basement window sills, batteries littered with debris, dim lights and rare books scattered on counters mixed with painting and installations on sale.
I could never name one favorite writer - it seems to me that the eventful feeling of closeness to a particular text is constantly changing. Today, for example, you feel at different levels proximity to Turgenev, tomorrow - to your medical record, and the day after tomorrow you feel that your favorite writers are residents of the psycho-neurological boarding school, who leave messages for those who exist in open space. At the time of this conversation, my favorite writer is Sasha Serov, a resident of one of Moscow psycho-neurological boarding schools. He is very sensitive, and his whole speech is literature. From the last statements - just his appeal to people in the "freedom" (residents of the PNI are limited in entering the city): "I love you for beauty. For beauty." That's the name of our shared photo album.
I have always been interested in the life and characteristics of excluded groups: it seems to me that the task of art and media today is the search for alternative ways of communication. Those that reduce exclusion and develop new forms of community interaction. In general, the very communication with representatives of different communities gives a unique experience and makes you a participant in unexpected situations. Now I am interested in the contrast "here and there" - between the daily routine of an open public field and a closed regime space. In a psycho-neurological boarding school I run a small photo lab, where we strive to recognize ourselves and draw parallels with the outside world. That is why now in my backpack appeared Soviet book "People with impaired development" - I found it in the grief of discarded waste paper. The publication provides recommendations for communicating with people with disabilities, and the authors do not choose words and do not care about the severity of the theses.
In the “Sitting Russia” movement, which helps convicts and their families, we have invented a media laboratory in which former prisoners learn to tell stories in their own words and look for a suitable media form for them: this is a creative rehabilitation option. We are doing this project with journalist Misha Levin, and the laboratory includes a variety of people. Now we are publishing a literary crime journal, which will be released under the editorship of a man who has been in prison for over thirty years.
Sergey Dovlatov
"Met, talked"
Dovlatov for me is a family writer. I think that at the age of fourteen, after taking from the grandfather from the “Compromise” bar in a paperback, I was a little rethinking my attitude towards reading and the writer as such. Periodically, we spoke with quotations from Dovlatov, and for a short period of time they became a universal language for communicating with family: jokes, good wits - that is all. For some reason I am very proud of it!
Dovlatov to us in Krasnodar brought my uncle, who travels a lot. Then the city was rather poorly with at least a little modern editions, the culture of reading was reduced, rather, to the classics from the school curriculum and gift books about the Kuban and the Cossacks. I read the "Compromise" and went to the school library for Dovlatov, where, of course, nothing happened at all. "Go to Pushkin!", - this is such a massive building with white columns, a thousand secret rooms and giant crystal chandeliers. You can register there only from the age of sixteen. In general, I found some collection of the writer in the edition of “Alphabet-Classics” and at the beginning of each lesson laid it out along with all the textbooks and notebooks in the school. To date, almost all of Dovlatov has been read and occupies a separate place on the shelf.
Daniel harms
"I was born in reed"
I will never part with this edition, even though it is quite a review material on the heritage of Kharms. Here are letters, and children's poems, and "The Old Woman" - everything is mixed in a heap, but rather succinctly. In this book, some of the pages have been torn out: for some reason, the first two sheets of “I was born in reed” and a bit of “Old Woman” seem to have convulsively wanted to read them seven years ago or have inserted them into some kind of letter. Harms completely rebuilt my sense of tongue in transitional age: he had a quick thought to lay down on everyday speech, and his legs were chilling from some techniques and phrases. Texts, for example, "What was it?" or "Incubatory period", were mantra - through quoting, repeating and embedding in reality.
Stanislav Jerzy Lec
"Almost all"
My reference book aphorisms. Basically, here the so-called letsevsky "frashki" - short statements that may be in rhyme, and may not be. Most often, Jerzy Lec thought about choice and honesty - and, of course, life and death. He has an interesting biography: during the Second World War, while in a concentration camp, he was sentenced to death, and he was forced to dig his own grave for himself. Jerzy Lec hit the SS man with a shovel, changed into his uniform and went to Warsaw to live and work. About this story he has a famous text "Who dug his grave?" from the collection "Nonparty thoughts", which begins with the fracas "The first condition for immortality is death." Of my favorites, however, every rhymed naive like "At the bottom is safest: there is nothing below" or "Such words know a language that does not need a language at all." This book was presented to me by my friend Veronica, now she in Korea teaches children English.
Boris Kudryakov
"Dashing horror"
Kudryakov received the Andrei Bely Prize in the 70s. In the collection of awards, which I bought at one of the book collapse, I read its text "Shining Ellipse". Kudryakov - a writer is not something undervalued, but rather not sufficiently analyzed. He was engaged in street photography in St. Petersburg in the 80s, he had the nickname Gran-Boris. The texts of Kudryakov are very photographic: each final is a click of a camera, and the text itself is a display of exposure, setting poses, building up the definition of a frame-event. I analyzed it for coursework in modern Russian literature at the institute, I remember almost some photographic texts in the middle of nowhere. The book itself was bought just in "Borey-Arte" - this is a rare edition with a circulation of only 500 copies.
Pasha 183
"MMSI catalog"
The catalog dedicated to the Pasha 183 exhibition in 2014 is the first new catalog I bought. I did not get to the exhibition itself, therefore, in general, I took this edition. I wanted to have on the shelf the whole history of Pasha's works - especially since the documentation is really huge, and some graffiti simply no longer exists. I often leaf through this book; it lies well in my hands. Well, every day, going into the subway, I push the glass door and remember the work of Pasha “The Truth to the Truth” 2011, timed to coincide with the anniversary of the putsch in 1991.
Yunna Moritz
"Tales of the Miraculous"
My favorite children's writer. A couple of years ago, Vremya publishing house published a series of books: this is one of the best examples of unobtrusive and brightly illustrated editions. The book is framed by graphics and paintings by Moritz, I like the way the images flow into the texts and vice versa - I perceive them as one piece. This book has already been visited by many people, and I always worry about it very much. On the flyleaf is Moritz’s signature: “Nothing is more precious than your life.” The book was signed by Yunna Petrovna to me and my friend at the Non-fiction Fair in 2012. This is the only book on my shelf that doesn't smell at all, and I like it. Such publications should be handed over, collect layers of new stories - with notes, letters, postcards inside.
Andrey Bely
"Symphony"
Reading White is like listening to music. I usually open "Symphonies" from a randomly selected page, I do not bookmark. In Symphonies, as the writer himself said, the composition is “exceptional”: everything is divided into parts, parts into passages, passages into verses. After reading it can be difficult to escape: Bely's prose rhythm completely rebuilds the sense of time and space, even the gait briefly becomes in time with these texts.
I have a difficult relationship with the writer himself: I remember that at fifteen years old I dragged a huge volume of his texts, more than half of them were Bely's theories about composition and tact. She calculated something on a calculator, marked it in a book with a pencil, tried to turn it inside out how it was done. I like to play different games with difficultly arranged texts - although what I find in them can rarely be called a serious philological analysis. With White’s work, I haven’t yet managed to play a single game in the game - there’s a feeling that the author simply doesn’t tolerate this, and the words resist marks and signs. I have a completely clean edition of "Symphonies" - I treat it very carefully, rarely take it with me and, before opening it, I meditate a little. With White nothing else.
Monthly Newspaper of the Psychiatric Club
"The thread of Ariadne"
The latest news from the world of Russian psychiatry, psychiatric hospitals and psycho-neurological boarding schools. Before, I only read the publication in pdf, and here I managed to find a whole selection for the year. On the newspaper platform, an interesting exchange of roles takes place between the authors of the materials and their heroes; the publication was also created to give voice to people with special features. At the same time, the narrative is built according to unexpected models: the narration in the reports is conducted from a blurred "we", and the difference between the first and the third person can sometimes not be found. Here are published poetic texts of people with mental characteristics, "calendar of the believer" and the recipes on the last page. My favorite heading here is “Case from Practice”, in which psychiatrists share all sorts of stories about their work. You can find the story of a nurse from Germany about a woman who has not spoken for sixty years, or the history of a Soviet professor who for years has not found patients with schizophrenia, from which they have already been treated.
Medical card 29th station
Nenasheva EA, 15 / 05.94
I recently found my medical record at home - this is a card from birth, I have been reading it for a year now. Here, the doctor records the condition of my mother after birth, here it is written about my umbilical ring, here are the monthly descriptions of the appearance on a medical examination, here is a print of the Temryuk printing house from 1990. Reading the map gives me new sensations about physicality and bodily connections. And this, of course, literature. I started reading the map during the recovery period after the “Do not be afraid” action, when I was wearing a prison uniform for a month. Some excerpts from it formed the basis of the text documentation of this action, which is written mostly as a stream of consciousness.
Catalog of the exhibition "The World in Our Eyes. The Naive Art and the Art of Special People"
Fresh catalog based on the street exhibition, which was held this summer in the Park. Gorky. The Vladimir Smirnov Foundation and members of the Petersburg art studio "Perspectives" exhibited the work of their wards (residents of psychoneuro-boarding schools) on the way to the Garage Museum and watched the reaction of passersby. The collections of art historian Ksenia Bogemskaya (recognized naive artists, so to speak) and the work of contemporary artists from the studio Perspectives interact in the catalog itself. The catalog was signed by Kirill Shmyrkov - also an artist, a resident of one of the PNI in Peterhof. Cyril moves in a wheelchair, he has cosmic facial expressions and gestures, he loves fish. On the catalog, he wrote "We hope the connection will not be interrupted, we hope that you will see such cards with fish." Sheets from the catalog and the truth can be pulled up and presented as postcards.