Master of reality transformation Dmitry Bulnygin encourages not to be afraid and throw art into the fire (but only the art specially designed for that)

The idea of the project dates before the institution of the general quarantine in France.

It all started because my living conditions have changed significantly, compared to my past life in Moscow.

The building where I live now is abandoned and located in the forest. A large number of fallen trees around serve me at the same time as a material for sculpture and as firewood. By the way, it is forbidden to pick up deadwood here, there is a specific old law of another century. So, there is a particular criminal component.

Living in an illegal house, heating the room with picked up "stolen" firewood, I felt like in the new Middle Ages. And the plague wanders around... And you feel as if you are in a castle – our workshops are surrounded by a fence with locked gates, and in the neighbourhood, there is a super secured and hung round with cameras military facility.

Inside, you are a member of a clan that lives in such conditions, as autonomously from the system as possible – without social support, but with mutual assistance. Contacts with the government occur only for bureaucratic reasons. The art system is also behind the fence, and communication with it becomes a kind of a challenge.

A suckling pig, as known, is slaughtered when it lives on mother's milk only. Its meat is very tender. My art is also tender and brutal at the same time. It is chic to buy and eat this meat. Burning art in a fireplace is also chic, accessible to few. Both of these extravagances characterize the representatives of another clan.

As a result, I create objects that, for a potential consumer of my art, are firewood, worth more than the wood itself. My message and work are added to the price. One can burn piglets in a fireplace watching the way their little carcasses, ears, snouts and tails are artistically burned. There is something from Dostoevsky here.

One can shoot a video of this process. Or one can pull a half-burned pig out of the fire and add it to one's collection. The owner, in this case, will become a co-author.

Before the quarantine, I had to go to Paris 4 times a week for language courses. It took a lot of time, 8 hours every day. Now everything is cancelled, a lot of free time, so I cut suckling pigs in our castle, without going out beyond 100 meters.

On top of everything, this activity in itself is incredibly exciting – working with the shape and resistance of the material, recalling the lessons of sculpture at the institute, mastering technological methods for processing wood and understanding its characteristics. Doing roasting tests of sculptures. Again, there is physical activity in the open air. Industrial injuries. There are a lot of exciting things.

So, every day brings a piglet. Before the quarantine is over, I need to make a big pile of firewood-piglets!

To be honest, I get bored with it sometimes and switch to other parallel projects. 

I work with papier-mâché or plastic. I want to note that all the materials I use are recycled.

But that's another topic.

03/31/2020 Cesson, Île-de-France

Dmitry Bulnygin