The nails collected from the ashes in the stove in the author’s workshop become a material witness to the winter of 2022-2023. Having lost their original function, the nails are deformed, covered with rust and soot. The "tracer" created for the project, consisting of a system of moving magnets that sets in motion a mass of nails on the surface of the tablet, leaves mechanical traces of friction and incomplete combustion products on interchangeable sheets of paper.

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Each of the subsequent sets of the kinetic installation leaves less pronounced traces of rust and soot on the paper. The sheets with traces of the tracer's set are exhibited in a given space and are part of the installation. The daily increase in the installation of "traceograms" demonstrates the gradient of the severity of traces of the found objects' movement.

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The kinetic installation recreates Madeleine Akrish's ideal laboratory observation, which proposes to describe sociality in terms of scripts or situations of creating connections between human or non-human actors. The concept of a script is synonymous with the language of programming, where words in the code are simultaneously actions.

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As in the case of sociological and anthropological methods of studying this process, the observer of the installation can only see the factors of change and their stage results. The aesthetics of the "white cube" and the mechanics of the movement of the found objects, which are implicit to the viewer, imitate the laboratory sterility and repeatability of scientific research, answering Bruno Latour's "damnable question." Is it possible to describe the action of people and things using the same vocabulary? Do things act on the same level as people?

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Project Curator: Kyrylo Lipatov
Technical Curator: Roman Klymenko, Coschey Lab