arts visuels Arc-et-Senans

Masha Gavrilova/

Écrivaine, chercheuse féministe, artiste interdisciplinaire et dramaturge

Masha Gavrilova

2024

Masha Gavrilova is a writer of Udmurt and Tadjik origin, a feminist researcher, an interdisciplinary artist, and a playwright, she works with theater, performance, installation, and participatory practices.

In her writing practice, she focuses on gender politics, queer visibility, and critiques of capitalism. She collaborates with playwrights, theater actors and directors, visual and sound artists. Blurring the boundaries between documentary and fiction is a constant feature of her work.

Residency project:

“Planes have fallen”

“The anxious anticipation of the apocalypse is one of the key themes of our time. Glaciers are melting, the ozone layer is deteriorating, fresh water is becoming scarce, and natural disasters are becoming more frequent and destructive. On the other pole of the same fear is the uprising of machines, the establishment of android dominance. A post-human society built on the intellectual superiority of machines over humans. The only possible survival option is to conquer nature; to destroy artificial intelligence. The weak perish at the very beginning of the journey, and only one.

But what if we imagine that in reality, humans are not the main protagonists of the impending apocalypse? What if no one wants to fight against them, and they are merely incidental victims of circumstances? In the imagined post-apocalyptic space, the airplanes had fallen, humans will find themselves on the periphery of the collision between two powerful post-human forces: nature and machines, and will become chroniclers. What if this person is not meant to be one patriarchal, misogynist, homophobic, cis-centric person, but queer people?

The work 'Planes Have Fallen' is about such an end of the world. In an alternate reality, a queer couple of researchers attended a conference on global warming. During the conference, planes started falling from the sky, and all kinds of warming began to occur. One of the planes separated the heroines, so for a long time, they strive to find each other, reconcile the planes and nature, and not die. The work will be done as an audio installation using large text inserts.”