Horizons

HORIZONS
Sasha Rotts, Pavel Rotts, Elena Rotts

The project was on view in the Narva Art Residency exhibition space from 11.06.2022 to 18.06.2022 in a form of a long durational performance. Joala 18, Narva, Estonia

The horizon is usually perceived as something unreachable like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. It’s a border that we can see but not touch; memory horizon, event horizon, horizon of possibilities, the horizon that always runs away if we try to approach it.

Being a border of our visible world the horizon sometimes overlaps with political borders. When Pavel was three years old, his family moved to the small Russian military town Luostari, situated close to the border with Norway, where his father was an officer in the Border Guard Forces. The real horizon of the Soviet-Norwegian border could be seen from the apartment window. The border guard cap covered with embroidered flowers by Pavel’s mother becomes a clear anti militaristic symbol.

Unlike the many elusive horizons, Narva and Ivangorod have a uniquely hard (yet porous) border. One can literally step over the horizon here. The situation of the ongoing war re- veals the ghost of the iron curtain and a looming, threat.

The Horizons project by SASHAPASHA, while being originally conceived as a homage to the well-known Horizons series by Timur Novikov has taken on new resonance as a gesture against the Russian imperialism and colonial ways of thinking. The horizons and borders of the empire are widely described in Russian and later Soviet literature. Poetic in its nature and ironic in its form, the reduction of a scenery description to the stripes on the second-hand sweatpants is at the same time a reduction of geopolitical ambitions of an empire to the meaningless lines on the giant ruined map.