"Initially, Teplushka had a form of a hand-made book with photographs, drawings and texts. Now it is a multimedia project embracing all these elements plus prints, site-specific murals, installations, and video art.

Teplushka is also a journey into the dark forest: a soldier’s dream in a trench, a diary of existential survival and a chronicle of the fight against absurdity.

The name of the project refers to the Soviet past of Siberia. Despite originating from the word teplo (warmth) it stood for a railway wagon insulated with a stove and adapted for transporting people - most often to war or to a labour camp during the times of the Great Purge. Thus, the teplushka became a symbol of the totalitarian system, when millions of people were exiled to Siberia, but at the same time it stood for a shelter, most primitive house able to save from cold death showing how little a person needs to survive.

This video is only one part of a larger project. In it I draw parallels between the past of Siberia and the present. The visual sequence, which at first glance consists of everyday everyday sketches, gets darker and darker, and recalls various episodes of the hard Siberian past. I use the inversion as a semantic point, a symbol of an inverted world, when white becomes black and black becomes white - the world that can arise as a result of a change in optics, when something unthinkable, shocking happens, with the optics however are being restored. In order not to go crazy, you need to create yourself a navigation map in this new world, you need to look for something that is most important, some points of support. I try to find these points with the help of the project."

(Yanina Boldyreva)