Found Persons. METHODOLOGY
Denis Davydov
When I was at school, I once encountered a travelling Uzbek circus performing outside the city. I already knew something about these traditions, but mostly through stories and images. In my imagination, the travelling performer belonged to an almost mythological world - colourful, theatrical, vaguely Eastern, removed from ordinary time. What I encountered was much more complicated.
The troupe travelled in an old bus. Between performances, its members wore Adidas trousers, worn Nike trainers, T-shirts with Western bands or films printed across them. Nothing about this diminished the extraordinary nature of what they were doing. These were still people carrying skills acquired through repetition and often transmitted within families, moving from place to place, performing acts that required precision, discipline and risk. But all of this existed simultaneously with the most ordinary signs of contemporary life.
I remember being struck by the distance between the romantic image of the travelling performer and the social reality of the person performing.
That distance has remained important to me.
I remember being struck by the distance between the romantic image of the travelling performer and the social reality of the person performing.
That distance has remained important to me.
The people who appear in my work rarely begin as characters. More often, I encounter them accidentally. Someone seen on a street, at a bazaar, during a journey. A photograph taken while walking. A figure remembered from childhood. Sometimes several unrelated people gradually collapse into one.
I think of them as a kind of found person.
I think of them as a kind of found person.
Like a found object, a found person attracts attention before their meaning becomes clear. I do not necessarily need to know their biography. Often it is the surface that first produces the encounter: a particular jacket, a posture, a haircut, a pair of shoes, the strange combination of a traditional garment with a mass-produced object, a logo, an imitation of a logo, something expensive beside something obviously copied.
These details are not incidental. They locate a person in time.
Central Asia is often represented through highly legible signs of culture: ornament, craft, architecture, traditional dress. But everyday life is assembled from much less coherent material. A black suit, an Adidas stripe, a plastic bag, a Chinese imitation of a European brand and an inherited gesture can occupy the same body without contradiction. I am interested in precisely this simultaneity.
Central Asia is often represented through highly legible signs of culture: ornament, craft, architecture, traditional dress. But everyday life is assembled from much less coherent material. A black suit, an Adidas stripe, a plastic bag, a Chinese imitation of a European brand and an inherited gesture can occupy the same body without contradiction. I am interested in precisely this simultaneity.
Two elderly men I once encountered became the starting point for one of my works. They were not twins, but something in their similar clothes and appearance made them register almost as a repeated figure. About a week later, at a market, I happened to see two actual twins, dressed in completely ordinary black jeans and shirts, selling produce.
The two encounters somehow folded into one another.
The two encounters somehow folded into one another.
What interested me was not the identity of these four people but the accidental rhyme between them. Repetition suddenly suggested doubling, and doubling suggested duration: the possibility of encountering oneself again at another age, another point in a cycle. Eventually this small observation became a work about ageing, recurrence and infinity.
This is often how a character enters my theatre.
The original person gradually disappears. Documentary observation becomes memory, memory becomes exaggeration, and several incompatible sources begin to inhabit the same figure. By the time the character appears in a work, it may contain a photographed stranger, an illustration, an invented face, a remembered gesture and the clothes of somebody else.
Digital modelling intensifies this transformation. Once the human body is removed, every social marker becomes strangely explicit. A tracksuit is no longer simply something a person happened to wear. A suit becomes a decision. A logo becomes a sign. Ornament becomes almost too ornamental. The artificial figure exaggerates the systems through which we read a human being.
This is partly why my characters often appear slightly excessive, decorative or even kitsch. I do not want to correct that excess.
It allows different cultural registers to remain visible at the same time rather than being resolved into a coherent image of place.
It allows different cultural registers to remain visible at the same time rather than being resolved into a coherent image of place.
For me, the poetry of everyday life often begins exactly there: when things that supposedly belong to different worlds appear naturally beside one another.
A ceramic figure wearing something that should belong to another century.
I collect these encounters because they reveal something that a carefully constructed image often conceals. Culture rarely appears in life as a complete system. It arrives in fragments, repetitions, mistakes, copies, memories and unexpected combinations.
My characters begin with those fragments.
A ceramic figure wearing something that should belong to another century.
I collect these encounters because they reveal something that a carefully constructed image often conceals. Culture rarely appears in life as a complete system. It arrives in fragments, repetitions, mistakes, copies, memories and unexpected combinations.
My characters begin with those fragments.
Project team
CG visualisation and animation:
Konstantin Gromov, Eugeniy Padalkin
Video Editing: Danya Smirnov
Sound: Farhad Farzali
Konstantin Gromov, Eugeniy Padalkin
Video Editing: Danya Smirnov
Sound: Farhad Farzali