Igor

2023

 

Bomba gallery, Center for Creative Industries Fabrika, Moscow

graphics, scratching, installation

 

The topic of mushrooms has been of interest to me since childhood. Back in 2014, there was an idea to create a "Mushroom Journal". The magazine was supposed to contain poems and essays and various art dedicated to mushrooms. Materials were collected, but for various reasons the magazine was never implemented. Probably the first question that arises is: why is the mushroom Igor? Once last winter, we sat with my artist friend Tanya Chertopolokhovaand discussed different names and our associations with them. In short, at some point we agreed that, for various reasons, Igor is a very appropriate name for a mushroom and only later realised that the name ‘Igor’ in Russian is actually an anagram of the word ‘mushroom’.. By the way, it is curious that the name Igor comes from -lngvarr, where the first part of the name -Ing -is the name of the Scandinavian God of fertility (abundance), and the second -Varr-means "army, strength." Fertile force, army -why not a mushroom? I think everyone will agree that the role of the mushroom in human life is great and multifaceted. The word mushroom itself has many meanings.

 

This mushroom, whose image finds something in common with the human for simplicity, is called Igor. In the context of the project, the mushroom is also multivariate: it is a huge wild-growing edible mushroom the size of trees that appears to the girls in the forest and frightenedly runs away from them. Igor is not averse to drinking beer and chatting with the "mushroom womanizer", he is not averse to helping his friends -Dasha and Anya.
You can even call him in the middle of the night, and he will pick up the phone and give wise advice, or offer a meeting in half an hour in a clearing. The mushroom can take away the bride and have ambitions to marry one of our mutual friends (I would like to note that the names in the stories are not accidental). Mushrooms have their own life, similar to human life -more precisely, in an attempt to take the mushroom out of the context of utilitarianism and exoticism and return its subjectivity, we can imagine it similar to a human one, and in this eternal interweaving with a human one, developing it to phantasmagoric images.
Huge Igor can be found in his own kitchen at breakfast (Andrey and Mushroom), but also a mushroom is a baby who, when found, can be tickled with a pockmarked belly with a finger (especially if it is a boletus), and who plays with a mushroom picker sitting on his hat.

This is also a gift that a shaggy monster, similar to the hero of the Brothers Grimm, holds underground in his hand (“The bottom has already appeared; and they see -a wild man lies there, his body is all red, like rusty iron, and his hair hangs down to his knees. "). Finally, Igor is both a wooden mushroom on the playground, which suddenly began to walk, and a darning mushroom. Mushrooms have agency -mushrooms "went". And they are still going.

Mushrooms are part of an expanded myth, whose fragments are presented in the project. As you know, the true essence of the fungus is the mycelium, the mycelium. The rest is only temporary and dying fruiting bodies. Therefore, it is possible that Igor is just one single mycelium with different bodies. Undoubtedly, mycelium, mushroom is underground. Metaphysical excursion into the kingdom of mushrooms. This project is an attempt to isolate a mushroom from the context of utilitarian, ecological, psychedelic and other clichés and an attempt to single out its subjectivity, present its history and the world, the myth in which it lives. Fragments of this world, flickering like nascent fruiting bodies in the body of a mycelium in different places. Therefore, the project is built on the principle of a rhizome (that is, again, mycelium, in order to highlight, emphasize the nature of this world -decentralized, branched, where each element is equivalent to the others). Some of the texts of the project were created with the participation of a neural network. The exposition is complemented by a list of 400 synonyms for the word "mushroom", ending with the word "Igor".