A certain fascination with the natural world in all its different-sized components lies at the core of Katranland, a utopian, ecocritical universe suspended between life and its artistic replicas. From eggs divested of their shells to a Dostoevsky-like mushroom to artificial forests of cables and aluminium, Katran’s installations in Russia and across Europe have long favoured science and technology as the ideal instruments to capture the impact of man-made alterations to the environment and the world’s most precious cultural heritage. War occupies a special place in his art, as the very deadliest of human interventions. The Saga of the Tin Soldiers (2014) denounces as dubious the necessity of fighting and killing to achieve illusory goals; Until the Word is Gone (2021), featuring terracotta sculptures that represent sound waves of the word “art” spoken in various, often endangered languages across the globe, acts as a reminder of the fragility of human civilization, which is threatened by war, political genocide and climate catastrophe.
The artist hates conflict, but can’t help feeling divided in his approach to current events occurring in his country of origin, Ukraine. His very history speaks of an identity chronically split between two nations. After spending his childhood and youth in Nikopol, Sergey moved to the nearby major industrial city of Krivyi Rih and attended university there. In 1991, when the USSR collapsed, a terrible crisis ensued. Fate brought him to Moscow, where he had the opportunity to support his family in Ukraine. This is how the artist’s life in Russia began.
I first interviewed Katran about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in April, shortly after the news reporting the massacre of Ukrainian civilians in Bucha had shocked the world. The artist got in touch again in mid-September to inform me that he eventually departed Russia at the beginning of the month, a couple of weeks before the mobilization announced on 21 September. Much as he resisted leaving, he confessed that staying any longer would have been incompatible with his principles. While revisiting some of his major art projects, both my earlier and more recent conversations with the artist focus on Sergey’s current situation, the stance of artists in times of war, and the ways in which his work has captured the growing tensions between two countries he has lived in and loved over the past twenty years.
—Caterina Domeneghini
Sergey, the last time we spoke you were still in Moscow, planning to make an artwork dedicated to the war. Can you tell me about it, now that it’s done? I know some Russian newspapers have dubbed it the “Ukrainian Golgotha” project.
Yes, I was in Moscow in April when we last talked. I did mention at that stage that I was going to do something, and that “something” was my installation Murals, which was exhibited at the Elektrozavod Gallery between 17 and 27 May, 2022. It was a semi-open event, to which only trusted colleagues and friends were invited. You remember, perhaps, how I was saying that after 24 February I could not do anything for forty days, that I was feeling split . . . I still am, by the way. The effects of that forced separation still live with me. I was in a somewhat schizophrenic situation where my heart, thoughts and anxieties were in Ukraine, while I physically remained in Russia. And that situation went on for what seemed like forever. I decided to resume my work after a while, even though I was not feeling entirely up to it. Many artists were leaving the country then and even more have left it since. My first reaction to the invasion was to come up with a project, and that project was Murals. It was an act of defiance: I did not wish to be silenced or intimidated but wanted to express my thoughts and feelings about the tragedy that was unfolding right in front of our eyes, online, live. The idea of the exhibition presented itself in a flash in my head, and this is how I started planning the show at Elektrozavod in late March. Elektrozavod is an independent gallery run for artists, by artists. Most of the people invited to the preview were either fellow artists or other art professionals. We discussed, debated and shared opinions about my installation and the current situation.
For Murals, my method consisted in giving up control over the final result and relying predominantly on the element of chance—in this particular case, the fire as a medium, and the traces that it left on the walls. This way, the fire had its own autonomy in finding its ultimate artistic form and expression. As for the “Golgotha” image you have asked me about, the idea for it came to me on the third day, when I was feeling semi-conscious from the amount of smoke, carbon dioxide, and other products of combustion which I had to inhale in the process of making these Murals—the images were burnt into the walls in imitation of the explosions and bombardments taking place in Ukraine. So, it would not be an exaggeration to refer to this image as the product of my unconscious: I had no preliminary sketch for the resulting Golgotha-like image. On the contrary, it emerged in a spontaneous and unpremeditated creative process. I had some doubts as to whether there should be any figurative elements in my work—I wanted to make sure that no narrative element would downplay and obscure the importance of my whole message. However, I decided to keep it in the end, and it eventually proved to be the right decision.
Were you aware that Anselm Kiefer’s These writings, when burned, will finally cast a little light (12 Apr 2022—29 Oct 2022) opened at the Doge’s Palace in Venice just a month before your installation was launched in Moscow? Did you get any inspiration from it?
Yes, I had heard about it, but I did not get to see photos of Kiefer’s installation until later. My Murals were a visceral response to the situation in Ukraine. Some people do find parallels between my work and Kiefer’s, but I used different methods, different support (scorching images directly onto the walls, rather than doing paintings) and was motivated by different emotions. If there is any similarity there, it is purely accidental.
What happened after Murals?
I made an effort to follow up on other art projects. Perhaps, the most important one for me was working with inclusive studios for disabled children, helping them to express themselves and create art. This kind of artistic collaboration helped me to refocus and take my mind off anxious and obsessive thoughts. For me, working with these inclusive studios was a newly discovered dimension of freedom, both artistic and personal. In a way, I am grateful that the present situation prompted me to collaborate with these kids. And for this reason, I do not wish to leave Russia for good. I still want to go back and work with them.
And then, in September, I was mounting my exhibition in Yerevan. As the atmosphere in Russia was getting denser and darker, I took the decision to stay in Armenia, which I do not regret. Not because I avoided the conscription drama (for which I am also grateful to providence), but also because it felt so wonderful to have recovered the sense of being open to the rest of the world. Getting rid of VPN apps was so liberating!
Many Russian artists left the country long before you. Many artists, too, have withdrawn their participation from important international events, like the ongoing Venice Biennale. Does art still have reasons to exist in times like this?
You know, when the whole thing started, I was talking to some good artists, quite well known, and many of them were expressing a whole range of sentiments, emotions, thoughts. Some of them were saying, “What have we done wrong? How could we not prevent this from happening?” A couple of them were saying they didn’t want to be artists any more.
It’s the usual thing, as clichéd as it may sound: art works with rather fine substances or fine energies, if you like this expression. It works with a certain germination of thought. Do you know the phrase “when the cannons are firing, the Muses are silent”? Art seems irrelevant in situations like this. Artists feel that their voices are not going to be heard, because there are other, more pressing issues of survival on people’s minds. Perhaps art should use other media in times like these. It might need to be more performative, more poster-like, as it’s closer to action and speaks more directly about the current situation.
On the other hand, when looking at the chronicles of places ravaged by the war, like Mariupol or Kharkiv, such discussions appeared to me nonsensical. There was a constant struggle raging on within myself as an artist: the futility of my efforts on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the wish to speak up, refusing to be silenced in the face of the atrocity. Taking all that into account, the project I called Murals has now come to represent an outlet for my feelings of frustration and grief. It took me only three days to finish the artwork, leaving all the gallery walls scorched and covered up in soot. And you know what? The most striking thing on the preview night and afterwards was that some artists approached and thanked me. They confessed that they also felt despondent and depressed at the end of February, helpless, useless, small. Art seemed to have become meaningless to them. However, seeing Murals made them feel empowered again. In a way, this project turned out to be important not only for me but also for our artistic community. After seeing Murals, some artists were able to resume their projects. They told me that my installation gave them some fresh impetus; it convinced them that it was possible to create art in times of war, thus making obvious the clear but forbidden message that the war is a great tragedy, and one must do anything within one’s powers to put a stop to it. Peace is not a respite between wars but a normal prerequisite for human existence. War is not inevitable, war is not necessary; war is entirely avoidable. So, Murals became my antiwar project on the tragedy in Ukraine. It became testimony to the unutterable, inexhaustible grief and pain there. And it became therapeutic for me and other fellow artists because we could acknowledge and express our feelings this way.
You seem deeply interested in the value of art as a collective good. Your latest project in Oxford, Until the Word is Gone, is an appeal to human solidarity through a patrimony that we all share, that is, language.
Yes. Until the Word is Gone is a project that lies at the intersection of various disciplines because it touches upon linguistics, art, anthropology, and others. Language is our heritage, as much as other forms of material cultural heritage. It’s just that we do not pay enough attention to it. Language expresses this or that culture or civilization in a condensed form. It is a coded system that contains all the most important notions and encapsulates philosophical theories and ancient mythologies which a particular culture has produced. So, when we lose a language, we lose a certain perception of the world. Our culture forces us to have a certain perception of the world and we think it’s the only one, but when we come into contact with other cultures and languages, we discover there are so many other ways of interpreting this or that phenomenon, even the natural world. And the more languages we speak, the less colonial in our attitudes we end up. As an artist, my major task is to establish connections, to create a dialogue between people who can at times be radically different from each other. Until the Word is Gone celebrates the immense cultural diversity of the world, in all its fullness and magnificence. Contrary to all this—as I recently stated in a letter to Wolfson College that was circulated to the students—the war divides, tears apart, cripples, annihilates, derides, and distorts whatever remains precious in human nature and culture.
Russia and Ukraine have been speaking the language of hostility over the past decade, yet they have never stopped feeding your artistic imagination. Perhaps Russia even more than Ukraine, in a sense? Your career only really started when you moved to Moscow.
It is incredibly complicated for me to answer your question. Perhaps behind this assumption that I became a more prolific artist after I left Ukraine lie the seeds for an even broader question, one concerned with the necessity to leave one’s country in order to make art freely . . . It is a question that takes us back to the idea that artists should migrate and continue their work elsewhere right now, a point that we touched upon earlier when you mentioned the Venice Biennale. Yes, in the 1990s and early 2000s, there might have been more opportunities for me artistically in Russia at some stage. But it must be understood that, besides artistic strategies, there is also private life. My early time in Moscow was a happy one, personally and artistically. I expanded my network and managed to find a milieu that nurtured my career and offered me the opportunity to remain financially and artistically independent. At that stage, it was possible to live and work in Moscow, to freely express oneself and feel relatively safe.
What did the artistic panorama look like in Moscow back then? Was it a fairly open space?
If you read the history of the Russian art market in the early 2000s, Russia offered vast opportunities for artistic development. It was a time when all sorts of galleries sprang up, all kinds of art shows were running without being censored. Even if scandals occasionally occurred, they did not have the same consequences they would have now, leading to arrest and, in some cases, imprisonment. Moscow was the first city in Russia to hold a Sotheby’s auction, in 1988, and people like Kabakov and Bruskin (whose exhibition was recently censored and closed in Moscow) suddenly became stars of the art scene and moved to the United States. Now, as you know, Sotheby’s has recently closed its office in Russia, putting an end to the whole era . . . It was a time when Russia hoped to become a democratic country and the whole world was open to Russian artists, more or less. It was also much easier to find someone to promote or sponsor your exhibition, especially as an emerging artist, because contemporary art was better appreciated and understood in Russia. You can look at the spectacular career of Oleg Kulik, an artist from Kyiv who belongs to an older generation: he teamed up with gallerist Marat Guelman to create ground-breaking and controversial art shows. Guelman has recently been proclaimed a foreign agent and Kulik was questioned and faced possible prosecution for “rehabilitating Nazism” with his sculptural work Big Mother, exhibited at Art Moscow. As for the Ukrainian art scene, it gradually started getting accustomed to the notion of contemporary art around 2004–2005. Prior to that, Ukrainian artists received very traditional training and the public still had little experience in viewing contemporary art and faced difficulties in contextualizing the artworks, because of their lack of fundamental background knowledge. A new era began when Pinchuk opened his foundation in 2006 and started seriously supporting contemporary Ukrainian artists. In Russia, this process began much earlier, and as early as the 1990s one could enrol in various contemporary art schools or study with Joseph Backstein in Moscow.
Anyway, to return to your previous question about having to make art in a different country . . . If you ask me about the present, I think it’s neither me, nor any other artist, who should be leaving, but the people who have initiated the whole situation. They should be the ones to leave! I realize that it’s a utopia, but perhaps as an artist I have a licence to create utopias and this is how it would look in my ideal world.
Can “storytelling” be another word for “creating utopias”? You use narrative to shape alternative worlds that bind people together in an attempt to work out the meaning of your art. The Saga of the Tin Soldiers was inspired by Andersen’s fairy tale of a similar name, Until the Word is Gone by Tolkien’s linguistic trees.
Yes. I think that the fairy tales, legends and traditions we learn during our childhood become part of the inner landscape of our soul for good. They enter our subconscious and then we act them out without even noticing. I recollect coming up with an action that consisted of writing the word “happiness” on a watery surface with a pitchfork. It corresponded to a common proverb shared by Ukrainians and Russians: “It is written with a pitchfork on the waters”. Overall, the proverb refers to something vague, tentative or even dubious. I came up with the idea of this performance all of a sudden; it occurred to me one morning during spring, right after I woke up. We managed to stage this performance right beside the Hermitage on the Neva River, in the very heart of St. Petersburg, during Manifesta 10 in 2014.
This leads us to the question of what the mission of art, the justification of its existence, is. For me, it’s a paramount question. In my mind, the artist is the person who creates alternative universes, these possibilities that do not yet exist but have the potential to become reality. It’s the array of possibilities that the artist creates in their narrative through an artwork. This is what I consider the mission of art, because when something is conceived of, you know, mentally, or created as an artwork, it can eventually be brought to life. It can finally happen because people become aware of the possibility of its realization. This is the most important role of art, in my opinion.
One element that fascinated me about your background is that your alma mater in Krivyi Rih was next to Kvartal 95—the neighbourhood that inspired the foundation of Volodymyr Zelensky’s entertainment company in 2003. Do you think the Ukrainian President’s former background as an actor, or indeed a storyteller, adds to his capacity to inspire resistance?
I would say that to an extent it does, but before it all started, he had been a moderately popular politician. The situation has brought out the best qualities in him. Certainly, he has the ability to create narratives—he is an excellent public speaker—but it is mostly all about the personal leadership qualities that came to the fore in this particular situation. Contrary to all expectations—not just of the Russian authorities but of Europeans as well, who were offering him the means of escape—he didn’t leave; he didn’t run away; he stayed, and he managed to bring the people around him together. A narrative alone would not have been enough, I think. These are the personal qualities that translate into narrative, and the narrative in this case is a medium that channels them.
Speaking of great storytellers, could you tell me more about your relationship with Fyodor Dostoevsky—or, I’d better say, with his lookalike mushroom? You named a fungus after the Russian novelist for your Kombucha–Dostoevsky project (2013).
I did! This Kombucha mushroom you’re referring to was very popular in the last years or days of the Soviet Union. It is known as “tea mushroom”, or “Manchurian mushroom”, and is believed to have originated in China. I don’t know if you have ever heard of it. It is a symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast that is fed sweetened tea and produces a sweet, fermented drink rich in B-vitamins.
I happened to get my Kombucha mushroom from another artist, Alexander Petlura. When I glanced at it en face, it looked like the profile of Dostoevsky! Hence the name. Since then, my mushroom has produced lots of children, and has had a very exciting artistic career. At first, I treated my Kombucha fungus very pragmatically, as most of us do—as a drink. But then certain transformations began to occur, because in the course of a few months I started to think that the mushroom was symbiotically becoming part of me, as I was drinking it, and I suddenly realized that I was the mushroom’s agent. I became his assistant and made performances in which the whole rationale was that the mushroom-artist should exhibit itself while I should only act as his medium who has legs and arms and channels its will. To me, mushrooms are something that can be used in artistic, non-trivial, non-traditional ways. However, the Kombucha–Dostoevsky project has stopped for now. It’s almost as if the artistic inspiration of the Kombucha has died out. The mushroom is silent. I cannot continue with it while the war is going on.
You addressed a crucial turning point in the tensions between Russia and Ukraine in 2014 with The Saga of the Tin Soldiers. Here, a miniature army melts down to rivulets of metal before a furnace generates more soldiers. Were you conscious back then that things were going to get worse?
Well, in every situation when one state breaches the integrity, the borders of another state—either lays claims to a certain part of the territory, or annexes part of it—even if this happens in a peaceful way, in a bloodless way, it is still war. It still creates tension. One point of tension generates other points of tension, and it all grows exponentially. The meaning behind The Saga is that war breeds war; sooner or later everything explodes. So, in a certain way, it was logical to foresee what’s happening now as a possible scenario developing out of the past tensions.
For the first time, this work was shown at the Belyaevo Gallery in Moscow, exactly when Vitaly Patsukov was organizing an exhibition dedicated to the events of World War I. Of course, this was the first clash between Russia and Ukraine, and I was very worried. And there were also some minor indications that works like mine were not particularly welcome. You can see exactly when and where the video was made on Katranland, my website.
Have you ever suffered any repercussions for making this work?
Since 2014, I’ve had fewer and fewer opportunities to exhibit this project, because many of the institutions I offered it to rejected it, saying that, unfortunately, they couldn’t exhibit it. In my case, there were no direct prosecutions, rather it was a form of polite ignoring, of refusing to take notice of this work.
I would like to talk about the other two projects you presented in 2014. One is Free Eggs, where egg yolks are stored in an aquarium of some sort. What’s the symbolism behind this?
It’s mostly an absurdist installation and it pursues several goals. First, it’s dedicated to the Dadaist movement, because the installation was displayed when the centenary of the movement was about to be celebrated. Secondly, as you no doubt know, Dada was also born as a reaction to the World War I, to those actions that artists back then considered to be “absurdist”. They said, “If all these politicians, all these very learned, rational men, decided that war was the only solution, we should also behave in inexplicable, unaccountable, and impossibly provocative ways”. In this, the artists saw an antidote to the whole war situation. It was an internal decision to behave eccentrically in order to oppose war and create new absurdity in reaction to this rather absurd situation in which people were killing each other. In this absurdist reaction, too, I saw a lot of life and a genuine energy, because it had certain carnivalesque features to it. It was a gut reaction, very visceral, at least at that stage.
So, the first aspect was to commemorate this. Secondly, the work also contained a certain irony and a commentary on the totalitarian character of Russia. What I did was to take these eggs and divest them of their shells. The shell is a sort of protective armour that shelters the creature inside it, this embryo, this living being. So, with the shell being taken away, the eggs were deprived of their protection. They became shapeless as they were placed into an aquarium, a rectangular container. The container had a particular connotation—it is a mass-produced, industrial item, without individuality. All these live creatures, which had the potential of becoming individual living beings, were put into the container—a space that did not come naturally to them; they had this rectangular shape forced upon them in order to fit in, as if created by some kind of evil demiurge, and they ended up being crammed into this really restrictive box. This became my metaphor for totalitarianism, which has not yet been entirely overcome in Russia.
At some point, there was also a discussion on how my project links to Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the body without organs (BWO). Indeed, there are lots of parallels between my work and this principle. Summing it all up, the resulting communal body in Free Eggs is nothing else but the merging of the bodies of individual eggs with their neighbours, where personal and individual borders are completely destroyed. The resulting biological mass is eventually shaped by its container as an outside factor, the symbol of power that has a monopoly on violence. You can also view this resulting biomass as some sort of BWO that contains all these potentialities of life, which only remain potentialities without fully realizing their potential.
There is also a porcelain head of Vladimir Lenin that crops up in a corner.
Yes. There is indeed a third and final aspect to the exhibition: in 1916, Cabaret Voltaire, an artistic night club, was established in Zurich, Switzerland. It was founded by the Dadaists Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings in February. It was a cabaret for artistic and political purposes. And we also know that at this particular time Lenin was still in Switzerland, because the revolution had not yet broken out. He was still in Zurich, a place he loved above all places. There is a high chance that he visited this cabaret—we don’t know for sure, but it’s my conjecture. Hypothetically, he could have visited it, and I find it very curious that he made his revolutionary ambitions real after this. If you look carefully at how the figurine of Lenin is arranged, you see that it finds itself inside the aquarium, together with these soft eggs divested of their shells. This is again a metaphor for what happens to totalitarian societies: the person who organized this society, who was the founding father of it, in a way ended up becoming hostage to the totalitarian regime as much as those he subjected to all sorts of controls and revolutionary atrocities. It just shows how tyrants also end up with those they are trying to oppress.
The other work I was referring to is Factory Fake of Mark Rothko, displayed at the show at Lucida Space (2014). It plays with the concept of the “natural fake”, also with a reference to Russia’s attempts to keep up with the Western economic model back in the 1990s. What exactly is going on here?
First of all, Factory Fake is a contradiction in terms, an oxymoron. There is a certain irony in this project. It is a contradiction in the sense that art can be self-referential and self-parodying. The idea behind this was, essentially, “What if Rothko saw these stains of colours in a factory like this?”
It is a project that deals with issues of appropriation, copying, and the creation of fakes. You know, it is often said that life imitates art, but I would also say that sometimes life exceeds art. Nowadays, the meaning of the word “fake” exceeds all possible connotations that could be associated with it. It has acquired new overtones it never had before. In Russian, this word came primarily to denote an “art fake”, because it was first borrowed from the art dealers and museum’s lexicon. It used to have a ring of professional jargon to it, but now it has become ubiquitous, especially in the press. It has taken on a whole new meaning: if one releases something that contradicts official Russian state media, it is called a fake. And then, depending on the character of the “fake” statement circulated, the author can be jailed for up to fifteen years.
Suddenly, the fake is something one wishes to share as some true statement, but it is false, because it is not supposed to be true. This is something very Orwellian. Like Free Eggs, Factory Fake, indeed, bore an Orwellian ring to it, and the new meaning of the word “fake” also belongs in this category. When I was creating this project, I couldn’t even imagine that reality would transcend my boldest imaginings, and the degree of absurdity would grow to such an extent. I worked on my project before the war started. It’s something that I still need to adjust to, because I am not supposed to share what I want to say, as it would be called a “fake”.
I also would like to comment upon the fact that in the 1990s, when the USSR collapsed, the country started building a new market economy, and over the thirty years that this economic pattern or regime was created, Russia managed to fit into the world economy and its major mechanisms. What I couldn’t even imagine, and neither could other people, was that it would discard this development process in favour of totalitarianism. The whole of Russian society is quite perplexed by the current situation. Many support this “special military operation”, but nobody he knows supports the war. This is all the more true now that the war has reached so many homes and a great number of husbands, sons and brothers have found themselves conscripted into the army. So, I can only hope that it will end as soon as possible. Nobody (I mean, ordinary people on both sides) expected things to turn out this way, and there was no justification for it. This feeling is quite pervasive.
I would like to move to your 2017 installation Forbidden Place. It encapsulates several themes that are central to your practice, especially the tension between nature and culture, and the utopian mission of art. Were you aiming to create another utopia with this work?
Yes. In fact, there are several aspects to this, and I would like to start with the notion of “forbidden”, if I may. Surprisingly, I showed this exhibition in many places, but the most memorable of all was the exhibition in Minsk (2018). That happened before all the recent developments. Back in those days, I had managed to visit many “forbidden” exhibitions myself, and when I say “forbidden” I mean that these were secret exhibitions, so only people who were trusted and people who were really known were admitted to such exhibitions; no outsiders were allowed. I was present in Minsk at one of these exhibitions when only people on the secret lists were let in—I cannot say that I have experienced anything even close to this in Russia so far. It was a great experience, above all, to find all these forbidden spaces where people could come together without being followed or persecuted.
Semantically, then, as you say, my “forbidden place” was yet another utopia that I was trying to build. Within this utopia, there is something I called “the liquid state of heaven”. It’s a state in which you meet your kindred souls. Whenever that encounter happens, this liquid state of heaven manifests itself. It doesn’t have a religious connotation, though; it’s a different kind of thing. This “liquid state of bliss”, as I also like to call it, has lots of properties, but meeting a kindred soul, experiencing this sense of togetherness, is probably one of its major properties. It’s a utopia where all things are possible, which are not possible within a state—I mean, they are not even conceivable within the notion of state per se. You can think of a secret church or society. It is not an artwork. It is something that happens, an instant recognition in the course of an encounter, when you find your match, or meet a kindred soul, a friend, a sympathetic follower, a muse, etc.
It is a utopian world, but it also contains certain ominous elements that draw it close to a dystopia: there are cables everywhere, symbolizing the realm of technology that actively penetrates human lives.
You’re right. A forbidden place is a no-trespass zone, just like in Chernobyl after the catastrophe at the nuclear power plant. It is intended to induce the viewer into a state of confusion. Technologies follow their own logic of development, different from human logic. And this can lead to tragically conflicted situations. However, this exhibition, while reserving its right to remain not entirely understood, reconciles nature with technology. Nature appropriates all technological inventions and discoveries made by humans, elevating them to the status of a “new nature”.
I have had a very similar back and forth with another artist recently. We were having a conversation about nature, about technology, and about the nuclear bomb. We thought that there might have been a certain logic of nature in creating a human being, waiting until that human being achieved a certain degree of developed consciousness and discovered the laws of nature and its secrets through physics, and then created a nuclear bomb that leads to self-annihilation so that nature could start everything all over again, a new project. Forbidden Place is probably something to be understood in these terms. Does this answer your question?
It does. I am reminded once again of the cyclical nature of The Saga of the Tin Soldiers, where soldiers are relentlessly destroyed before a furnace produces new offspring.
Yes! Also, if I may add to this, we should remember that it is inconceivable for us to speak of death, because our consciousness is appalled by the notion. So, whenever we are speaking of death, we are still speaking about life, and even when we think about the possibility of nuclear catastrophe, we still reject our thoughts beyond it and try to find something positive, which is stupid. It is stupid to think that some form of procreation will survive after this. I hope that reason will prevail, and we will avoid the worst. But I cannot help noticing how absurd human logic can sometimes be and how it turns against itself. I hope our surviving descendants, if indeed there are any, won't have to look for a geological layer called the post-apocalyptic Anthropocene.
