Embankment, Bldg. 9. Disappearance  

Video, color, sound, 7:46 min., 2021

Chelyabinsk

Genre: video documentation, digital archaeology, urban observation  

The video is shot from a single viewpoint: the camera captures the courtyard at Naberezhnaya Street, Building 9. Throughout the video, cars drive by, people walk, a tractor moves — and all of them disappear at the same exact spot, near the building’s entrance. The disappearance doesn’t happen instantly, but rather gradually, like a slow dissolution, creating a glitch-like magic effect within the everyday landscape.

The visual simplicity of the frame amplifies its ghostliness: the city seems to follow its own logic, invisible to the observer. A rupture emerges in urban reality — a hidden malfunction.

The work is dedicated to the fictional institution from the Strugatsky brothers’ universe — the NIIChaVo Institute (Institute for the Research of Magic and Miracles), which studies the miraculous within the mundane. Here, the miracle hides at the level of pixels, shadows, trajectories: the city as an illogical, elusive organism.

This video is a slow, nearly imperceptible observation of the magic of repetition and disappearance within the city’s routine — a study of time, of “holes” in reality.