She told me of the nights they spent criticising and joking about the government in their kitchens, periodically turning to the closest power socket with the reassuring: “No, no, but we’re actually very content” to whomever might be listening.
A folk tale sounds that if you lose yourself in the forest, you need to turn your clothes inside out so that the forest goblin, a creature of the world mirrored under the ground, where our dead are, mistakes you for his own and shows you the way out. In this interactive sound installation, equipped with an electromagnetic microphone you are a voyeur, a foreign agent, an onlooker and an accomplice scanning the space that feigns normalcy, where up is down. They say just as you thought you’ve reached the bottom, someone knocks from below. A motley assemblage of conversations which are intercepted, listened in on, recalled or recorded attempts a search for sparks of civil disobedience amid absurdity of censorship and the decline of civil rights, while questioning the origin of the atrocities, trust in disinformation and passive endurance. Cutting through the middle is a generational divide tearing up family ties.

Composed of fragments of lectures, broadcasts, Youtube videos or social media posts by political scientist Ekaterina Shulman (included in the register of foreign agents of the Ministry of Justice of the Russian Federation), historian Tamara Eidelman, Doxa student journal, Feminist Anti-War Movement, former Meduza editor in chief Ilya Krasilshchik, theatre actor Jean-Michel Sherbak, Anastasia Vasilieva of the Alliance of Doctors, Ruslan Lviev of the Conflict Intelligence team, documentary “We and the Others” by Feliks Sobolev with social experiments by psychologist Valeria Muchina, a phone conversation between a Russian soldier and his wife intercepted by the Ukrainian secret service and oral family histories. Narrated by Katia Krupennikova, Masha Domracheva, Sara Culmann, Roman Ermolaev and Polina Medvedeva.