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Belarusian Artists Celebrated End Of Year Of Culture At Garbage Dump

Belarusian Artists Celebrated End Of Year Of Culture At Garbage Dump

2016 has reached a record high in the number of absurd decrees related to culture.

"Here we can say goodbye to our prejudices, our inertia, our dead heroes and move on shaping the culture. – Maksim Zhbankou explains standing over the rows of bales of waste paper: – All this is not life. And life will continue. Life will be what we will do after we leave this garbage dump."

The art event "End of the Year of Culture" was held at the North landfill. Having the music of the band "Pink Ghetto" and the roar of the garbage trucks on the background, best Belarusian artists drank "Soviet champagne" on a slope of the mountain of waste of the Belarusian capital and congratulated each other on the end of the Year of Culture, Radio Svaboda reports.

"Everything speaks for itself here, – the artist Ruslan Vashkevich says. – Even the circumstances are symbolic – to finish the year of culture at a dump of waste paper. After all, it really was a record hitting in the number of orders, papers, codes, permits to be a creative employee... People of culture have never received such a large number of paper slaps, as in this ridiculous Year of Culture. This is exactly the way I would like to finish and reset it. I don't want to endlessly chew this topic, being in a cloud of negativity all this time. But to finish these corporate parties with the real solemnity. We wanted to make this meeting unforgettable."

Vashkevich says, that the action is not a solemnly art action. He doesn't dare to call himself an organizer and explains that all that would not be possible without many people, who were near all the time.

"I could not do it without the art team, as we call it, – Vashkevich says. – Alina Sauchanka, Masha Khrustaleva, Viktar Patapavich... so many inspirers are here... Maksim Zhbankou - a mandatory component of the project, and it is important for me."

Philosopher and culturologist Maksim Zhbankou brought a bus of people to the celebration, who listened to a lecture about the "second-hand generation and junk culture" during the trip from Minsk.

"All that we call culture has its cycle of existence, like everything in life, – he says. – What begins as a sensation, as a Revolution as an Event, ends as a litter, trash, as something that is not to be recycled. That is why we thought it would be very interesting to finish the Year of Culture where usually the existence of any culture ends."

"It seems to me that the conflict between our desires, abilities and external circumstances plays us a joke, – Vashkevich thinks. – We are used to resist, this is one of our engines, this motivates us to take actions."

According to Maksim Zhbankou, the subject of garbage and trash culture is positive in itself. It resembles the Italian Christmas tradition to get rid of unnecessary things in the end of the year.

"I think that the natural form of existence of any culture - the deprivation of everything used, dead. We finally had to bury our dead and move on," – he says.

2016 was called the Year of Culture by the decree of Lukashenka.

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