“Vincent told me, “I have fungus”, he said, “I have scabies”, he said, “I have syphilis”, he said, “I have lice,” and I was holding him close to me.” – Hervé Guibert

A criminal chronicle in a Murmansk newspaper: a crime in front of a child. Post-Soviet Russian orphanage – cold, discipline, music lessons. Grandfather – care to which a new ritual of humiliation – which is always different – is a mandatory addition. Then Kyiv – queer, rebirth, daily work of reinventing yourself. Then – trash fashion, theatri-calization of everyday life, growing (someone would call it sick) interest and sensitivity to the shadow and marginal spheres: drug policy, cops and the far right, sects and superstitions, chipping and anticipation of the antichrist.
Thanatological performances with coffins and holes to the underworld. Hearty conversations with homophobic perse-cutors. Angelic look and purposeful study of the infinite space of the disgusting. Constant use of own blood – its substantiality: coagulation, drying, discolouration, saturating tissue or paper with it. Exit from the gender-normal-ized space, blurring the boundaries of identity, elusiveness. Endless practical experimentation with own identity and uncertain relationship with the modern theoretical basis, with available tools of self-description.
This list of characteristics, elements, circumstances, and preconditions – all the things that made Vladyslav Plysetsky* the way he is – can be easily extended. The components of this personal constellation are in constant motion, forming temporary mechanisms of interaction. The meagre descriptive text should have probably been like this: should list items, extend this list as much as possible, and finally announce that the next moment some of these elements will be combined in a completely unpredictable way, then in another way, and once again in a different way, and then other elements will be added…
Every possible autobiographical project of Plysetsky is always a version with a new starting point: let’s start with Murmansk, let’s start with Nazi or Munvarta raids on Nizhnioyurkivska, let’s start with collecting sectarian pamphlets about sodomy as a way to hell, let’s start with a dump full of garbage bags with whimsical costumes, let’s start with the fungus between the toes – and then, by combining, matching elements, and tying the chronology in knots, we will build a life story as a self-organized structure-in-formation. But “making art out of own life”, “radicalizing circumstanc-es”, and “looking for paradoxical combinations of these circumstances” are the foundations of conversations about autobiographically oriented art forms. However, separation of such practices from the elitist and corrupt definition of “art”, emphasis on anti-institutional, countercultural, and anti-normative nature are similar foundations, and this list can also be extended. Where there are too many recognizable signs, isolation of signs that are specific in a particular case, as well as a specific way of combining such signs, becomes the requirement for critical thinking. Let’s make this attempt, let’s try to name a feature characteristic of Plysetsky. Here it is:
Plysetsky is looking for signs of entropy and creates situations of decay. Not only is he just searching on the margins or in the world of subcultures, but he is also looking for closed thinking systems doomed to disintegration. Spectacles of the disintegration of the corporeal or mental, as well as disintegration of values and image systems, permeate every manifestation of Plysetsky, they are a certain constant in his practice. And in the Mold Kid project the aforementioned fungus on the feet, school” paper snowflakes covered in blood, which rhyme with the story of childhood trauma and development under the influence of such trauma (mediated by orphanage), together create the story of cretion-in-disintegration.

Instead of the process of growing up as an acquisition of a protective outer shell, there is a paradoxical maturing exposure with the gradual dismantling of the frame which holds together elements of different nature and different directions. Growing into a lifelike mold, Plisetsky provokes the disintegration of the things he touches.
Or else – Plysetsky appears in those places that are already doomed to collapse. Tenderness for the wound, tenderness for the rotting, as if indistinguishable from the disease and the patient – this is the specific author’s intonation of Plysetsky.
And the second specific characteristic: a certain alienation from oneself, considering oneself as a “case”, a “situation”.
The poetics of the biographical-as-traumatic, the voice of the “alternative man”, who is under the pressure of the rules of the majority, allegedly should sound like a cry of accusation. But not in the case of Plysetsky. It seems that he is interested in the disintegration of the old order just as much as in any process of disintegration in a closed system, as in any scene of decay and entropy. Fungus and mold eat away the dominant models of human coexistence, the nuclear family multiplies trauma, xenophobia paralyzes the development of thought – but it seems that according to Plysetsky it is rather “interesting’. His statement differs from activist language in the lack of an element of anger. Even the interception and re-appropriation of aggressive and conservative rhetoric about “perversions” is not in the spirit of a combat operation, it doesn’t look like appropriation of the enemy’s weapons – no, for Plysetsky it rather resembles finding an interesting and strange toy on the street. It is not “hostile”, it is “no one’s-therefore-will-be-mine”. As if Ply-setsky was looking from the future in the present day as in the distant past – looking with tenderness and sadness.
Plysetsky acts as a messenger from a new and free world, who is able to show curiosity and even a certain tenderness to today’s world and its decline. He disarms the doomed with a gentle touch.
*Sometimes Plysetsky, sometimes Plysetske. The use of the pronoun “he” in this text was agreed with him.








ukrainian young artists solo show’s edition
YASS 2022