Andrei Monastyrsky is one of the main ideologues of Moscow Conceptualism, a leading contemporary artist, and a co‑founder of the group Collective Actions, which began producing spatial and time‑based actions in 1976. Over the years group members have included Nikita Alexeev, George Kiesewalter, Nikolai Panitkov, Igor Makarevich, Elena Elagina, Sergei Romashko, and Sabine Hänsgen. Most of the actions were documented and published in fifteen volumes entitled Trips Out of Town.
The two‑hour video recording Depot was shot at Depot railroad station on the Savelovskaya line on January 30, 1990 for Andrei Monastyrsky’s installation Trip to the West. The location was not accidental. This was where Collective Actions participants met the viewers of their first actions in the mid‑1970s in order to accompany them through the forest to the Kievogorsky Field, which was the main place for the group’s events. The film is a minimalist sequence of views of railroad platforms, bridges, technical elements, trains, and the landscapes surrounding the station. The fixed shots of views are accompanied either by their usual background noises or the voices of Monastyrsky, George Kiesewalter, and Sabine Hänsgen reading excerpts from the Handbook of Snow, edited by D.M. Gray and D. H. Male (Leningrad: Gidrometeoizdat, 1986), in Russian, German, and English. The book consists of three parts: “Snow and the Environment,” “Snowfall and Snowcover,” and “Snow and Engineering.”
This film is the first in a series of video recordings (mostly made by Sabine Hänsgen) which not only document actions but also have their own aesthetic meaning as part of a “new demonstration space.” In the preface to the seventh volume of Trips Out of Town Monastyrsky stresses that, in his view, these videos focus on exhibiting the flow of events. Viewers are more involved with the metaphysics of place than the documentation of a particular action.
The short, thirty‑minute version of Depot was shown on April 29, 2022 as part of the eponymous action by Sabine Hänsgen, Elena Biserna and Henry Andersen at the Oscillation festival in Brussels.
- / Author