"All art is autobiographical; the pearl is the oyster's autobiography." — Federico Fellini

"Wall-building during the period of destruction" is the second part of a long-term group research project that crawls and flickers around the theme of home as an incorporeal, imaginary shelter, the architecture of memory, and various strategies for preserving subjectivity in an era of de‑subjectivation.

The first "assembly" of the Snail of Time, held in Moscow in 2023, was an attempt to analyse the situation of global rupture and turbulence: an impossible study – a study of ghost‑voices who had left their home, which turned out to be an illusion.

The boot, the wall, the snail, the slime, and the Dark Middle Ages.

Yes, ghosts too have voices. Even the snail has a voice – it is transmitted through the vibration of the earth. The earth vibrates from the boot that strides ever wider. The boot – that which has become home. Emigrants took their favourite boots into another life. But there are other boots too, leading with an unnaturally wide step straight towards death.

The silver slime is a scar from the loss of a former life, a trail left by snails crawling towards the Moon of an impossible future. It is Henry Miller’s Moon, the Moon of longing, the Moon of nostalgia – a viscous, pale‑green glob of sadness. Artist Vlad Kulkov studies these traces closely in one of the old houses in Tbilisi: he senses the movement of snails in the basement and records their glistening trail. The voices of those who stayed behind resonate as hollowly as those who set out on their journey and have already settled on the land of the Indians or the Svans.

Snails have no screaming voice.

But we keep hearing a squeak.

For us, they squeak.

I squeak with them.

I squeak that I am here for dadi, mammi, dzma and mamida,

for the sake of being with those who stayed,

to stand, to move like a snail,

to explore our architecture:

the uninhabited, cold, ruined square,

to explore our "clothing as architecture of inner space",

to analyse what is now and what comes next.

Politics kills faith, politics kills people.

It is now most evident to what extent we and contemporary art have been neutralised – art of meaning, not of craftsmanship. Meaning has been toppled and inverted, interpreted for convenience and profit. Wall art, on the other hand, shines and flickers with the absence of meaning.

It seems that art has exhausted itself, its strength, its logic of cataloguing and abolishing catalogues; art no longer says anything, because it has cut off its own tongue.

So what next?

Still the same ballad from old Bukowski:

"Style is the answer to everything.
A fresh way to approach a dull or dangerous day.
To do a dull thing with style is preferable to doing a dangerous thing without it.
To do a dangerous thing with style, I think, is art.
Bullfighting can be art.
Boxing can be art.
Love can be art.
Opening a can of sardines can be art.
Few have style.
Few keep their style.
I have seen dogs with more style than men,
though not many dogs have style.
Cats have it in abundance.

When Hemingway blew his brains out against the wall with a shotgun, it was stylish in its own way.
And sometimes people set their style on others.
Joan of Arc had style.
John the Baptist.
Jesus.
Socrates.
Caesar.
García Lorca.
I have met stylish people in prison.
I have met more stylish people in prison
than outside it.
Style is otherness, the way we do things
and what life makes of us.
It is when six herons stand motionless in a pond,
or when you walk out of the bathroom
without noticing me."

The Wall of Otherness.

The second chapter about the Snail is a chapter that crawls along the wall. We naively continue to seek ways to protect ourselves, to build at least something – even if temporary, unreliable, makeshift, absurd. We imagine the wall not as a barrier, but as an imagined direction of path, a materialised trajectory. Into ourselves? The walls of a well leading into micro‑worlds…

If we are fenced in from all sides, then we must build our own walls, invent our own shape for them. To confuse, to barricade, to tend our own garden, to grow rosemary – the flower of memory – and myrtle.

A wall in a vacuum, a wall without ceilings, a wall in space – architecture without an ideological mandate, a self‑built structure, a non‑functional object, a cut‑out piece of reality bearing a palimpsest of cultural layers. A cut‑out piece of wall is a cross‑section of reality, exposing the pipes of misfortune hidden within it.

"You cannot hide misfortune in the basement. Together with the wastewater, it flows into the sewers, passes into the gas pipes, spreads to all the kitchens, and none of those who put their little soup on the pale‑blue flame of the burner know or suspect that their food is cooked on misfortune." (Günter Grass)

Whatever we try to say, our wall is also a wall of ignorance. A barrier against a world where everything will be explained to us, where everything is clear and obvious, where "they know better", where "there are reasons for that". Otherness is the knowledge of the unknowing.

I do not know. I do not know when the end will come. Nor do I know what will come after the end. The end is an infinite duration enveloping everything. But the end must end in order for anything to be conceivable or constructible. In order to be able to crawl further. So something else matters more: what will come after the end? And can one who has learned to live in the end start anew?