In memory of the empire

(Maria Jesusa de Solorsano)

At Winzavod, the most active and interesting center of contemporary art in Moscow, Linor Goralik and Dmitry Tsvetkov tell us a story, the story of little Maria Jesusa de Solorsano, a mexican twelve year old girl that reveals an unexpected talent in the arrangement of funeral flowers, that under the guide of Valery Markovich Fayman, an old russian immigrant, becomes a high demand flower arranger, thanks to her ability of representing the soul of the dead with her arrangements.  

Maria Jesusa de Solorsano, after the first demand of a client that wanted to celebrate the end of a relationship, begins to arrange for any type of funeral occasion. Her rosaries become ornaments that people hang in their houses to remember ended events of pasts. And when Valery Markovich finds himself upset by Maria's depreciation of the rouble, he tells her tales of a contemporary Russia, stories of a country that is dying, and she represents them with her rosaries.  

The consent of Medvedev in the country, the arrest of the members of the opposing party, the space tourists that pay tens of millions of dollars for a trip to  the orbit, the armoured cars that the russian government prefers to buy abroad: these stories, by a mexican prodigy child that rappresents dead souls, become a way of narrating what happens today in that which was once the biggest empire of the '900.    

Maria Jesusa de Solorsano's story itself tells us about the siberian distance between Russia and the rest of the world.