| Aljoscha | |
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22.02.2022  Bioism condemns any violence against humans, animals and plants. I stood naked and unprotected as an animals and plants are in the silent protest against any kind of ideological madness. Stope insanity, seek for kindness! Protest intervention 2 days before Russian invasion. Two days before the Russian invasion began in Ukraine, I worked in Kyiv on a new project. In the hotel room, I turned on the TV without sound and watched Putin addressing the Ukrainian government. His voiceless facial and body expressions were ominous, aggressive, hostile, machine-like and stripped of humanity. When I listened to the speech again with sound on another channel, the sense of danger and upcoming disaster became confirmed. War was imminent. Yet the Ukrainian government, Zelensky himself continued to assure people that there was no serious cause for alarm, and public discourse was filled with reassurances. I felt a dissonance, an urgent unease and decided to act. Working intensely I created two new pink bioisms. That same day, I went with them to the Motherland Monument. This towering relic of Soviet armored war ideology stood for me as the embodiment of aggressive violence against humanity and the machinery of dehumanization. My intervention was simple: stripping myself naked at the feet of this immense power symbol of sacrifice and holding these small, translucent bioisms as a counter gesture, raising them high and forbidding its dumb huge sword, crossing it in favor of fragility, tenderness, peace and non violence. It was not a performance in the conventional sense but an ethical and philosophical intervention. The act rejected militaristic grandeur and patriotic glory of all kinds and proposed another reality: a world in which kindness outweighs control, where individuality is not displaced by obedience and brutality, and where forms of life, real or imagined, can exist free from the logic of domination and oppression. Standing naked in the cold before the monument, I removed all protective layers, embodying openness and fragility instead of armor. The pink sculptures, too, carried this message. They were born of urgency, independent of any ideological madness, and their presence at that site declared that another non violent set of values was possible. At that moment I was thinking of Gandhi. The Motherland Monument dominates Kyiv’s skyline, its sword and shield reinforcing a vision of brutal strength tied to obligatory sacrifice. Against it, the delicate biomorphic forms became an antithesis. They were created to oppose all wars and to question why such sacrificial monuments must exist at all. They suggested that humanity’s future could be modeled on biological understanding, diversity, adaptability and coexistence rather than on simplified dumb aggression and competition for resources. In the philosophy of bioism, coexisting with living forms, whether organic or synthetic, is a way of imagining futures that escape the confines of human-centric ideologies. This intervention embodied that principle: life as a deviative continuum, not a hierarchy; mutation as a virtue; vulnerability as a strength; divergence as a chance. By placing the sculptures in public space directly without announcement, I shocked people and police guards in their sleepy obey-order with my alarming urgency for peace in last moments of normality that seemed to be running away. The moment was fleeting, lasting only 7 minutes, but its intention was enduring. It was an assertion that art can still be a moral alarm call in front of impending catastrophe. The small pink sculptures against the monument were seeds, conceptual biofacts designed to grow in the horrors of bombings and killings, proposing that peace is not a passive state but an active choice to hope and to help. This act did not stop the war that followed, but it stood as a refusal to surrender entirely to its dehumanizing and depersonalizing logic which obviously infected my country either. It showed that even in the face of dominative structures, political, ideological, and state, there is room to assert values that are incompatible with violence and that can last. Our shared future depends not on victory but on our ability to create spaces for kindness and the unpredictable beauty of life itself. Do not kill. ART DÜSSELDORF Magazine: "Aljoscha Talks War and Creation" > |
