The works are part of the ongoing research regarding official soviet and post-soviet celebrations, festivals and rituals, focusing on the relation between the sublime, the affect and the state ideology, the discipline incorporated into the spectacle. Sosnovskaya refers to the idea that fireworks and gunpowder used in the military are parts of the same power constellation. For the collage she uses an archival image of the fireworks during the official celebration in the Brest Fortress memorial from the tourist album, representing post-war development of the city, along with the stills from the amateur video of the fireworks during one of the contemporary state celebrations. Those images are superimposed and collided with the xerocopy textures, technology defects, appearing in the margins of the image, seen as leftovers or excess of the official representations revealed during the attempt of their appropriation and personalisation (by copying). Like the amatuer videos attempt to capture, to grasp, to internalize and to keep the experience of the state spectacle and of its unutterable affect, the sublime.

The video work traces the problematics of the visual pleasure and relations between material experience and its production through knowledge, technology and language, looking into the soviet literature on mass holidays and pyrotechnics along with the military footage.

(text by Aleksei Borisionok)