the project is supported by SPIN
Supporting Principal Investigators 2024
The Mainline Group
The Mainline group is an artery, which pumps histories of people, machines, spaces and places between its two lungs: Lena Kilina (PhD, UNICAMP) and Sofya Chibisguleva (MA, Royal College of Art). We are a new kind of artist group, which doesn’t have to coexist in order to cocreate. We are ancient storytellers armed for a discussion with the technosphere. We are the East and the West. We are the global migrants, the children of lost ideologies, born in countries which no longer exist. We are the architecture, the narration, the analysis, the therapist, the chair in the choir of a new Enlightenment of post-everything.
Both separately and together we create stories about the fusion between people and their cultural past and collective future via contemporary forms of narration: video, sound, audiobooks and printed media. Born in Shanghai at around 4 am in November of 2017 we live primarily in the English, Brazilian, Chinese, and European cultural realms.
Leave, video and poetry (3 m 44 s), 2022
Leave! is a short film on the loss of place, nationality, masters, and purpose. Written and directed during the time of war, after a prolonged period of a pandemic, Leave depicts a character, battling their loneliness and demons, unaware that they are a demon of their own.
The text is written in Russian — the language of dissidents and refugees, and simultaneously — perpetrators and predators. The landscape is Parque Minhocão and its dwellings — a place of a well known urban revolution in Sao Paulo, where the citizens got tired of their personal space being invaded by traffic and reclaimed a whole piece of highway. It has turned into a pedestrian area, unprecedented for Sao Paulo.
The lyrics of Leave invoke discourse of power figures, deities, and commands being doubted and debated. Challenging the culture of submission to circumstance, the audio welcomes the listener to imagine a free world unsuccumbed to the will of others.
