№38 from "Secret drafts" series

Boris Kazakov is an artist who equips technologies with his own mythology. His technology is animation, drawn on paper, film, and now burned on wood in the project "Doctors/Huts". 

The burning technique is beautifully called pyrography, but in popular Soviet circles they had never heard of it, they simply created folk art on the outskirts. Kazakov came up with a saga for this technique of hand-made "paintings" about the struggle of a technogenic society with pagan huts on chicken legs. You can see in it a story about folk medicine and the medical industry, or you can see the life of an artist around his workshop in Kolomyagi - an old garden and a house from the century before last - a ring of hundred-meter-high termite mounds is tightening, making you doubt progress. Progress is ambiguous. 

It is the huts that are guests from the future (they were depicted by Vadim Ovchinnikov), and the totalitarian civilization of doctors is our obsolete past, the dead, grabbing the living. Doctors, like the military in the film "Stalker", patrol the areas of the huts behind barbed wire. Like the Americans in the famous secret film, dissecting aliens, they conduct meaningless experiments on the huts, because they do not understand the structure of the huts. Doctors came in formation from Soviet life: from posters about sanitary hygiene and civil defense, illustrations for "Aibolit" and "Barmoley". But Kazkaov sees their genealogy deeper - they feast on the paintings of the Itinerants, and who can figure out where Perov's hunters are. And where Peresvet and Chelubey are Avilov. 

The main thing: doctors are where there is pursuit, chase, hunting. And the huts, they hide in the forests and swamps, but not always successfully. Doctors catch up with them with their carts, similar to hellish ice cream vendors, throw them on the conveyor belt to make them obedient authors. Kazakov's megacomics, of course, stands out among the current animation projects (animation is now the main language of modern art). It stands out because in his huts, in an amazing way, like a spider web, there is a centuries-old feeling of Russian life - kennels in its eternal attempts to evade - to return from the onslaught of the state, nature-weather. I just want to say: good luck!!!

Text: Ekaterina Andreeva