No, he doesn’t look homeless. He isn’t a vagrant or an addict, stripped of age or meaning. You won’t find him tapping a dirty fingernail on your car window while you’re waiting at the streetlights.
He’s a snob. His words are full of sarcasm. He mocks my habits and considers them indecently bourgeois. He likes to argue. He also likes to remind me how back in the day I used to work in a small provincial theatre. That theatre had no stage of its own. The company performed in cultural centres, most often than not in the vicinity of Moscow. Sometimes we travelled long distances. When I look back, it seems those were the happiest days of my life. I used to say I’d never work where people clock in and out at the same times, same place, every day. The vagabond pokes me. It’s been thirty years that I’ve been living precisely like that. I try to object: the provincial theatre has had its own stage for ages! I can’t remember when I had to work in an office every day! He seems selectively interested in the facts convenient for himself. My arguments that I was only eighteen at the time and have slightly changed since don’t work. He hasn’t changed and hasn’t grown up. If I say that he only has an opportunity to travel because of these bourgeois habits, he’ll disappear in a huff slamming the non-existent door.
He doesn’t look like a homeless addict without age. I know his age. When I was growing up, my parents would often argue. To be more precise, I can’t recall a time when they were not arguing. And as often happens in such families, the kids get their fair share of being shouted at and punished, more than the parents off each other. I never lived up to expectations, nor did I do anything right. But things shifted when my Mom took me on vacation. For some surprising reason, she never found any faults with me when we travelled. I was left to my own devices and didn’t owe anything to anyone. That was when my inner vagabond was born. Shadows chased station light glares across the little dining table of our train compartment, there was the smell of coal off the water boiler and of cold chicken.
Once, we took a flight on a rickety biplane to leave a quarantined town seized by cholera. I’m not sure what it had cost my uncle to organise such an escape. Hitting the road seemed much safer than staying put.
I remember my first solo trip, I was fourteen at the time. When our An-24 kept circling over the Surgut runway for forty minutes with faulty landing gear – my inner vagabond was over the moon with joy! What an adventure! No difficulties or undoubted risks bothered the vagabond. Not that they bother him nowadays. What matters is that it’s anything but the all-consuming comfort of home!
As time passes, he thinks home is less of an inconvenience than before. What home? Ok, let it be. The vagabond thinks it’s enough to know it is there for him in case of a force majeure happening. He doesn't have to pay it regular visits.
Camera in hand, I find peace wandering city streets. I suddenly feel harmony. All the snobbism of my inner vagabond evaporates. He loves meandering the city, watching people hurrying somewhere and cars passing by. He loves sitting in a cafe or a station greasy spoon and watching its customers. Not so long ago he discovered that the tea infused with cinnamon, ginger, lemon and mint quite unexpectedly reveals the smell of old Soviet blocks of communal flats. One such building he came across a few years back in Riga.
He is he impressed with anything associated with roads, airports and all sorts of cheap restaurants. His zebra crossings are full of dynamics: their pedestrians replace one another constantly. They either walk or run, or if they stand, it’s in impatient expectation. He loves when the sky changes its colour and its black first turns deep navy blue, then pale blue and, finally, soapy pink. He loves popping in the most unlikely places. Particularly he loves the sky of airports, because they contain a lot of it. He loves to provoke.
Not many people read artist statements. Viewer, have you read this text to the end? I congratulate you. It was written by my inner vagabond.
