Spine
Polina Rusakova

In his book Vertebral Catastrophism, Thomas Moynihan develops the idea of the spine as a "paleontological record," a central axis along which the history of evolution from the primitive to the advanced is "inscribed." Moving down the spine, through the involution of the central nervous system of bilaterally symmetrical animals to the diffuse nervous system of coelenterates (radial animals) and beyond, is not only a journey into the past but also a movement outward, beyond individuality and the personal boundaries of pre-cephalic existence. Moving upward in time towards the centralization of the nervous system is a path not only towards rationalization but also towards the evolution of nociception (the perception of pain) and increasingly sophisticated forms of trauma.

Polina Rusakova's work Spine, which also engages the possibility of different configurations of perspective, literally includes the viewer’s spine in its concept. The project began with field research in a childhood place—between an abandoned military base, a railway connecting local mineral deposits, a river floodplain, and strange air "ghosts" formed by the exposed pine roots from which the sands had gradually washed away. The installation uses both material evidence of time—pine branches smoothed by water—and subtle, creeping suggestions of correction where curvature and nonlinearity may contain both a history of trauma and signs of resistance.