Broken Archives
Kirill Ermolin-Lugovskoy

At the center of Kirill's internal dialogue is the murder of a teenager in Samara in 2012, reportedly by a group of fascists. Working with open data, the artist uncovers not only the impossibility of establishing the precise details of the events—obscured by the fog of media, time, and the erosion of information (whether it be the exact number of stab wounds that led to death, or the status of objects at the scene—where a broken beer bottle or confused footprints could simultaneously be evidence, random litter, or a clue to the weapon used)—but also, in the end, the difficulty of determining his own place in this dialogue. Similarly, the identity of the teenager himself—composed of fragments of information, images, poems, and social media posts—leaves gaps in this interaction. This is not only because a ghost cannot present itself in the flesh, but also partly due to the fact that the words which could outline both his presence and the events themselves are, in the present moment, removed from the discourse accessible to an individual without jeopardizing their own safety.