Joseph Sywenkyj for The New York Times | “I never spent the night in the same place twice,” said Alexey Plutser-Sarno.
Ellen Barry | 21 January 2011
KIEV, Ukraine. — IT has become difficult to locate Aleksei Plutser-Sarno.
As a police dragnet closed around Voina, the radical Russian art collective that he belongs to, Mr. Plutser-Sarno stopped using cellphones out of fear they would alert the police to his whereabouts, resorting to Skype and, sometimes, letters hand-delivered by intermediaries.
When pressure from the police is high, he tries not to spend two consecutive nights at the same place, and he will concoct elaborate diversions — once he gave a flurry of interviews saying he was in Estonia while simultaneously posting blog entries from Tel Aviv, another place where he was not.
Interviewing Mr. Plutser-Sarno this month required waiting at the foot of a statue of an 18th-century Ukrainian philosopher for a young woman in a blue coat, who examined passports and led a circuitous walk to his location. Though no one mentioned it at the time, the philosopher was Hryhorii Skovoroda, and his epitaph read, “The world tried to catch me, but it did not succeed.”
If it sounds like a game, there is a good reason for it. For three years, Voina, which means war, has been playing cat-and-mouse with Russian law enforcement, staging street actions that ranged from the obscure (throwing live cats at McDonald’s cashiers) to the monumental (a 210-foot penis painted on a St. Petersburg drawbridge, so that it rose up pointing at the offices of the F.S.B., the security service).
Last September, Voina launched its most audacious project: “Palace Revolution,” which involved running up to parked police cars and flipping them over — a commentary, the group explained, on police corruption.
Artist Playing Cat-and-Mouse Faces Russia's Claws
##### Ellen Barry | 21 January 2011
KIEV, Ukraine. -- IT has become difficult to locate Aleksei Plutser-Sarno.
As a police dragnet closed around Voina, the radical Russian art collective that he belongs to, Mr. Plutser-Sarno stopped using cellphones out of fear they would alert the police to his whereabouts, resorting to Skype and, sometimes, letters hand-delivered by intermediaries.
When pressure from the police is high, he tries not to spend two consecutive nights at the same place, and he will concoct elaborate diversions — once he gave a flurry of interviews saying he was in Estonia while simultaneously posting blog entries from Tel Aviv, another place where he was not.
Interviewing Mr. Plutser-Sarno this month required waiting at the foot of a statue of an 18th-century Ukrainian philosopher for a young woman in a blue coat, who examined passports and led a circuitous walk to his location. Though no one mentioned it at the time, the philosopher was Hryhorii Skovoroda, and his epitaph read, “The world tried to catch me, but it did not succeed.”
If it sounds like a game, there is a good reason for it. For three years, Voina, which means war, has been playing cat-and-mouse with Russian law enforcement, staging street actions that ranged from the obscure (throwing live cats at McDonald’s cashiers) to the monumental (a 210-foot penis painted on a St. Petersburg drawbridge, so that it rose up pointing at the offices of the F.S.B., the security service).
Last September, Voina launched its most audacious project: “Palace Revolution,” which involved running up to parked police cars and flipping them over — a commentary, the group explained, on police corruption.
