The group Factory of Found Clothes (FFC) founded by Natalia Pershina‑Yakimanskaya (Gluklya) and Olga Egorova (Tsaplya) in 1995, has since its earliest works focused on the subject of things as projections of human existence. In their manifesto dialogue for the project Girlfriends (1995) Gluklya and Tsaplya stated: “We are friends, and as well as being soulmates what unites us is our shared interest in Things, and specifically, in their most human variety—Clothes.”
In FFC projects dresses literally spoke to the viewer and told them about the lives of their former owners. They reflected social traumas and fears, relieved themselves of their functionality, and became universal metaphors of human destiny. The duo diversified their work with clothes: they painted fabric and made it into dresses, gave a second life to found costumes, immortalising them by telling their tragic stories, sent them on journeys to dissolve their past in a new existence.
Interpreted by FFC, an item of clothing would ultimately become a symbol of a character’s inner essence, whether that person was a worker, a retired senior, a diligent schoolgirl or a heartbroken teenager. The main demiurge of their performances and installations, however, was the high‑school student, their alter ego: a figure of romantic recklessness, purity and preparedness for Great Deeds.
Gradually, their works became more socially oriented, yet their interest in textiles as symbols of life, and in the topic of the feminine, which represents supragender kindness, striving for justice, fragility coexisting with strength in friendship, remained.
Their video installation Scarlet Sails was inspired by Alexander Grin’s novel, whose protagonist Assol is able to cope with all the hardships of an unfair world due to her firm belief in the possibility of a fairy tale ending. The scarlet sails on the white ship of Arthur Gray confirm the reality of her utopian dream, bringing her happiness and peace.
In Gluklya and Tsaplya’s work, young girls do not rely on an impossible (or postponed) happiness, waiting for their prince by the sea. They are ready to create it themselves, sewing scarlet sails in the absence of a manly hero. Suddenly, senior ladies enter their workshop—they have spent years hoping to meet their savior, who will one day arrive from the imaginary. Their discordant choir tries to convince the girls to “believe in miracles,” singing a Soviet song from the Khrushchev Thaw era. Thus, the sober and decisive present meets the dreamy past, which can only wait for solutions to come from the outside. Their confrontation ends in a fight over the Scarlet Fabric, and the past, represented by the sad but persistent old ladies, wins. Grabbing the scarlet sails sewn by the hands of others, the ladies head for the sea, to sail away into the miraculous unknown.
The ambiguity of the image created by Gluklya and Tsaplya made this one of their best‑known works. Some interpret it politically—red being the symbol of the revolution—although the nature of the revolution here is unclear, since the appropriation of the products of someone else’s labor multiplies the injustice and essentially represents capitalist theft. At the same time, scarlet is the color of Life itself and of the mother’s womb. In this case, the appropriation of the scarlet sail can be interpreted as an attempt to return to a child’s consciousness that is paralyzed in anticipation of a miracle.
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