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Special projects
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Yuri Leiderman. Here Comes Home the Swiss Captain and Sees a Round Box on the Table (Geopoetics-5)
event
site and dates
curator
project description
“Here comes a Swiss captain home ... he is not even a captain but some affected and impossible foreign captain, doubly impossible given that Switzerland has no sea and, accordingly, no fleet and no captains.”
“Is he a sea captain?”
“A sea one, for sure, because he comes home after a voyage.” As seamen say, “One day we come to Genoa,” or “We come with full holds, with flags aloft, to our home port.” And the captain sees a round box on the table. It does not look like a pleasant surprise, this round box ornamented with some strange arabesques. What, not Muslims again, not another bomb?! Don’t touch, don’t touch it, you don’t know what is inside! Well, it looks as if what we have here is not the captain’s having full holds, but as if somebody’s loaded a holdful of shit. Here is a lonely, tired Swiss captain; perhaps his wife has left him, leaving a parting letter, a wedding ring and letters not from him in the box. So what? It’s the autumn of his life, his last chance, he should take it easy, what lies ahead is maybe simple eternity, straight, kind of black and white, Balzac age — photos of women on the wall.”
“So is it the wife or Arabs?”
“Oh, I don’t know, I don’t know, it is the captain’s undecided surface: his frock coat with shoulder-straps and half-round lapels, ridiculous doubled pockets, a red seaman’s neckerchief. And a top hat with a band and a glazed visor. Here, perhaps, we have touched ground, gone down to the bottom: what we have before us is the Swiss captain’s tall top hat and the low cylinder of a painted box. An abstract composition, an easy task, a geometrical moment: a composition of two cylinders. Against the background of the still uncertain fate of the Swiss captain, against the background of his fatigue, his women, his Swiss sighs in vacancy.”
YURI LEIDERMAN
organisers
- Moscow Government
- City of Moscow Committee for Culture
- Russian Academy of Arts
- Moscow Museum of Modern Art
Special thanks Gregor Podnar Gallery
 A full-length article about the project will be in the catalogue of the 2nd Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art which is
coming out on the 1st March.
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