Newspaper texts discovered beneath wallpaper during renovations represent rhetorical artifacts of past epochs and even palimpsests of the unconscious of various epochs, but sometimes they also combine to form intricate textual collages that produce a “ready-written” effect. The necessity of separating the plaster from the delicate layer of wallpaper juxtaposes criticism of capitalist slavery with doctors’ warnings on the dangers of poisonous jellyfish from the 1960s, reviews of histories of Soviet literature from the 1980s with prerevolutionary notes of Parfum de fleurs, and a fragment of the headline “Their weapon is lying and slander” with a photograph of a “native landscape.” The language of Soviet newspapers, conventionally understood as a sort of self-negating bureaucratic jargon, is recombined according to the necessities of home-improvement and paradoxically begins to testify against the political here-and-now, despite its archaic quality in its own epoch. It is not exact [тут я не совсем понимают значение ‘точной’] representation or the complete inflation of the sign but the simultaneous combination that produces this strange effect of textual spiritualism. Venues:

• Manifesta10 Public Program, S-Petersburg (2014)