Project 7 pants run by ukrainian artist and curator Sasha Shagi represents an installation, alive or online product about 7 colored pants for 7 days with 7 speeches on the chosen topic. Feet walking steps, steps define the movement, the movement borders with the speed of life, but life can satisfy a standstill or cross-races with colors. 7 pants – the text and visual stoppage-cloth-changes: when all the time rapidly running, sometimes you want to stand still or sit down and say a word or seven.

Monday 21 September 2009

Oh My Henry Miller / 7 pants in Berlin

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I came to Berlin to hang my pants in the quiet places of the city. The city can inspire, capture or scare, but the city is the mastered democratic territory of occasions. Cities like our lives are filled with signs, and if you encounter a sign and accept it, the sign will lead you further – up to conclusion – a logical combination of meanings or endlessness of events. Each building of the city, every corner and everything else - it is like a snare of internet network, but alive. Supposedly it is the way it should be that people go astray in the cities, because lost spirits take them to unfamiliar turns, corners, leave there and surprise. 

Six months ago, looking up in the Wikipedia biography of the famous anarchist Emma Goldman, I came across the name of Henry Miller, American writer, and since then dipped into the world of his work. I thought that he came to me and stayed around. He did it so suddenly that I had cut out of thoughts, I agreed with him in everything, draw into my dreams and asked him in his next pages for intersections with myself and my own headaches and at last - cursed him. Sex, creativity and thirst for life - the themes autobiographical trilogy by Miller "The Rosy Crucifixion", which really very defiantly crucified me in pieces and have not assembled probably back: it might disappear just as the answer to the question because everybody has different one, and the consensus here makes no score. Well try to answer the following: 1. Joy of satisfaction is sweeter then food? 2. Joy of satisfaction is sweeter then taste of love? 3. Joy of satisfaction will dazzle from the treason and send it to the devils?

I thought that I can write 7 letters to Miller and hang them in cozy corners of Berlin. To dead Miller. To Miller in the sky. So random people would find them and get acquainted with him, with great Miller. I wish so that my enthusiasm was an example, but may be not an example, but simply a reflection of nice creative commitment and more people would read Miller. Because some of his thoughts are truthful! Transformation of the written thoughts into accidentally discovered space – an intimate process, but such intimacy requires experiments and can produce fear. But I'm not afraid for some reason. Those letters – they express relevant, but not quite the major issues circulating in my mind for 7 random days. 

I certainly will not get him to answer my letters. And it certainly does not make sense to get answers that are trying to be answered in the various formulation for centuries. And perhaps – a great American and creator is only form and framing, as I write to myself, appeal to myself, appeal to those who read. For Miller said that moment is blissful when face-to-face with himself. And he said this: "Lord God created the world and did not go away from it, to be on distance, from some limb, staring at the work of his hands. The Lord God made the world and stayed in it: this is the essence of creativity". 

translation by iryna solovey
ukr version

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