The former pioneer camp, on the territory of which the park-hotel «White Alleys» is located, is an ideal place for telling scary stories and celebrating Halloween. But we rethink this holiday in the spirit of «Macabray*» from Neil Gaiman’s novel «The Graveyard Book», which is not tied to any seasonal dates, and imagine a day when the living meet and dance without fear with the deceased, who have come not to reproach, but to support them — which, however, the living, unlike the deceased, forget about the next day.
We propose interpreting ghost stories in the spirit of «hauntology». The neologism «hauntology» (from the English haunt — ghost, ontology — being) was proposed in 1993 by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. In his book «Specters of Marx» he writes that after the collapse of the USSR, communism did not die, but became a ghost, which, as in the Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, is again wandering around Europe, and Derrida likens this ghost to the Ghost of Hamlet’s father. In the 2000s, «hauntology» was rethought by the English thinker Mark Fisher, who linked it with cinema and electronic music.
In his book «Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures,» Fisher writes about the obsession with the idea of "lost possible futures," about being trapped in the eternal, uncontested present of capitalism and consumer society. Hauntology is not a synonym for all-consuming nostalgia, but a return to the past in order to find in it a now forgotten idea of the future.
We propose to invite the ghosts of the lost future — modernist and avant-garde, social or science fiction — to dance.
Artists:
Katherina Alimova, Mitry Grankov, Dima Gred, Pavel Zudanov, Natalya Konyukova, Anton Kuznetsov, Alexey Luka, Maria Safronova, Dima Filippov, Angelina Ushko, Ekaterina Shafir and Eldar Ganeev.
Photos:
PollyT, Mitry Grankov, Angelina Ushko, Ekaterina Shafir
*«One day a month called The Macabray» (Neil Geiman’s The Macabray, a dance between the dead and the living).
