NOTES FROM IN IMAGINARY COUNTRY
I raise my head to check whether the sun has dropped low enough — I want to understand how best to compose the frame. If it is still high, I can shoot a separate take of the sun and the ground. But it is still worth waiting: at sunset, the sun loses its brightness and turns scarlet, and in the video it begins to look painted. By evening, fatigue sets in, along with the desire to leave. The journey home is a long one; I have to pierce the body of the city, return from the border territory. The return is easier, but every time it brings a sense of unease. I have to ford the river or walk across old tyres packed with stones for stability.
Movement becomes the key element. The movement of the body, of thought, a change of place, the passing of days. Returning and leaving, moving closer and further away. I sway like a pendulum, growing rigid over weeks and days. How far can I swing, and is it possible to live this way? Everything created in motion is done a little differently, reinventing each time what has already been discovered. Pressing the camera shutter, pushing the button with a finger, counting the time, choosing an angle, stepping into the frame, knowing that the recording is running. Recording myself on camera in an upright position. Recording this time that could have been spent on something else.
Smells and temperature, wind, light — I feel like a station operator taking readings. I make a hole in the foil, then another, and another — hundreds of holes through which light begins to enter. How much of it is needed? In what sequence should it pass through and reach the light-sensitive material?
Reality remains outside the frame; here, there are only its traces, transformed by time. The distant echo of big cities, which can be found underfoot in the form of a rusty piece of metal. I feel how art wants to be precise, wants to be responsible, to maintain a connection with reality — and how it becomes reality itself. The echo of art lies underfoot, intertwining with the threads of country roads and weeds. Having lost its vitality, it settles in museums where there are no visitors. It waits to be read on a forgotten page. Its dust rises and settles when someone walks past. It lies in layers: what never happened and can no longer happen — I see it in the abandoned stelae beyond the horizon, in the earth exhausted by the heat. Each time, I begin again here and see something new. The sun passing between my fingers, its lines penetrating at a slightly different angle — a negligible difference, yet enough to create an image I cannot imagine in any other way. Through my fingers, I see nothing but my hand and the sun, and this becomes enough.
When the gaze is properly composed, the place itself turns out to be greater than any individual work. The potential of a space seemed more convincing to me than events that require their own reproduction in order to become visible. The same can be said of a person, of the mere fact of their existence in a particular place, regardless of their achievements. Perhaps this is why I saw this potential in my father: he embodied the image of a person alone with space, an image in no way inferior to works of land art which, as I imagined it, came closest to the idea of art in which I had recognised a value worthy of serving as a guiding principle. This turns life into a work of art, dissolved in time and place.
The potential of the image of a person capable of conceiving space and their place within it, of recreating a different way of life connected to a memory rooted in the land. To dissolve into it and gather oneself together again each time thought becomes impossible to stop. What might have been if history had taken a different path, if my places had been subordinated to modernity?
I could not stop thinking about the photographs I had taken in 2009. Back then, shooting with old Soviet cameras, I found myself in places I had never been to alone before, on the edge of the city where it gives way to the settlements of Izvestkovy, Uspenka and Kirovsky. Somewhere there, scattered remnants of rubbish, weeds, country roads and hills, along with the faint ruins of buildings, laid the foundation for an idea of coming into contact with the experience of life as it is — sprawled out, guarding its peace in this land. The impression was powerful, and it has remained so. Unlike at the mine, where my father’s figure guided me, here I found myself alone beyond the line, beyond the boundary, under the scorching sun and surrounded by the smell of weeds. When I work in remote places, my anxiety lies where I am either too close to people or too far away from them. Somewhere in the middle of this state, I can feel confident, sensing a connection and the possibility of control. There, I felt this: a path I could walk with my own feet and return home from unharmed.
I keep wondering what this means to me. It is a feeling I cannot experience anywhere else. Why do I feel a sense of meaning there, a value that raises no questions? Could it be that people, without even realising it, have created something that should never have existed? A meaning that cannot be divided into parts and that emerges only there.
Every time I film the grass beneath my feet, I realise that it is more convincing than anything I have ever seen. When I raise my head, I see the same sun shining on this grass. I imagined what it would be like if there were many suns. How would I feel if there were many versions of me, able to be together, walking in a line one after another and thinking ten, a hundred times more about all this? Would that bring me closer to unraveling the mystery of this place?
Moments of thought are fleeting, but the feeling lasts a long time. I feel close to this space, this country, which I can enter simply by imagining it in this way, and where, it seems to me, the answers to all my questions may lie.
In the dialogue with myself, amid the temptations that surround me, I sometimes drift away and forget that this place exists, that it becomes what it is when I find myself there. Certain works of art come close to this, describing something that may hint at this meaning, at deprivation and overcoming, at situations that require risk. And I realise that I am not ready to take risks. Perhaps this will remain a pale shadow, experiments prepared for export to an audience. Not for a human being. And I cannot say anything clear about the human being. Somewhere there, on the other side of the world, I understand that art could find itself, see itself in these places, find the support of the people who live there. But right now, I see no way for this to happen. These places are slowly fading, growing old alongside my parents, and will disappear for me along with them.
When I choose which road to take, if the grass is low enough, I will walk through it, keeping between two roads. Thought spreads across the plane, encountering no obstacles, and all I am trying to do is find a form for it, to limit its movement.
The present moment allows me to make art here, to use any tools to get closer to what I mean. I want to know what kind of plant it is, and I find out in a second. I order film, and the next day it is at my disposal. I record a video and send it away in the same second, standing in a place where the poles have long stood with their wires torn down.
This place can be a beautiful country.
***
This text was written by me on the basis of notes made during the fieldwork for the exhibition In Imaginary Country (2026), where the central idea is the splitting of the sun using optical instruments. The very process of directing the gaze, doubling, tripling, and superimposing horizon lines becomes a means of bringing forth an “imaginary” country that exists parallel to an officially sanctioned territory enclosed by borders.
The country emerges in border territories that are familiar to me, places at once defined by control and an excess of space. The melting of borders and control, danger and home, come together in lines of light captured through homemade disposable lenses.
Dima Filippov
