Uniting the Sleepers "No, don't take the word of people telling you how miserable they are. Just ask them if they can sleep. Yes - that means they're fine. That's enough." Louis Ferdinand Céline. Journey to the End of the Night. Michel Foucault, in his short text "Other Spaces," introduces the notion of heterotopia in consonance with Motolianz's work. It is about special places, mythical and real at the same time. These places belong to the space of culture, but, unlike "common places," they have a certain special, exclusive status. Their role is to suspend the dynamics of existing social relations while maintaining a connection with the whole, the universal. The first room of Semyon Motolyants's Anti-Personal Personal Exhibition, which realized that he understood nothing in contemporary art, is a material embodiment of the ironic thesis indicated in the title. The modernist tendency to combine plastic contradictions within the framework of a single artistic strategy, noted by Rosalind Krauss, is combined here with the inherent critical distance of conceptualism included in the work itself. The seemingly utopian idea of the unification of people in their sleep gathers the exposition of the room into a kind of unity. The current stage of capitalism, the collapse of a number of communist projects in the recent past, has led the artist to reflect on sleep as an important political frontier. It is the time of sleep, according to Motoljanc's thought, this shred of freedom that introduces interruption into the logic of working time, that must be subordinated to the practice of unification, as opposed to liberal immersion in the individual inner world of the dreamer. Importantly, the artist does not draw a rigid boundary between the physical process of sleep and the work of dreaming, which makes his approach closer to the logic of heterotopia, which includes not only the illusory utopian horizon, but also its material means of production. In this way, the artist tries to discover a more fundamental level of connection between people and to use its liberating resource. The potential of dreaming has already been captured in science fiction with stories of time travel and radical changes in the universe produced in the course of a long, long hibernation. The correlation of dreams with the future has been noted many times since antiquity. For Motolianz, sleep is a productive postponement of the solution to the "big questions" and represents a way out of the total game of capitalism. Sleepers, unite. In spite of the unimaginability of this protest slogan, it is not utopia in its purest form. Yes, we find ourselves in a strange, fictional place where the viewpoint of the awake is in question, but it is too real to be utopia, too material to not-exist. White baby blankets with colored supremacist cut-outs sewn by the artist's mother; boards with "hieroglyphic" inscriptions created from scraps-the inner spaces of plywood letters filled with white road paint; Motolyanets' favorite text-sheets, forming a kind of triptych of letter grids almost the entire wall, repeating the word "work." a pencil drawing in a white frame depicting the collective sleep of people in some official institution-all these objects do not so much take advantage of the whiteness of the walls of the legendary "Boreas," as they do of the proper reverence for the white cube itself. The distinction between the figure and the background is minimal here. The viewer's associations, like those of an analyzing dream, scatter in different directions. First of all Malevich's work "White on white" comes to mind, which, according to the philosopher Alenka Zupancic, opens the impossible space of the explosion inwards and brings into the work of art a moment of its impossibility, which also becomes a moment of creation: "This vacuum is a privileged place from which it becomes possible to create, and to see or understand what has been created" (Zupancic 2003: 8). The flying suprematist figures - brightly colored baby blankets sticking out of geometric slits in white duvet covers, also reminiscent of the buttons of a giant game console - introduce a dimension related to the utilitarian side of the avant-garde, when the rather complex way of creating a pictorial surface as an object, is transformed into the idea of design. Valuable for the artist's idea of collective sleep in kindergarten evokes a dual reaction: both a sense of emotion and the most transgressive memories. As soon as the educator left the bedroom of an institution that adults had invented on the model of a nursing home or psychiatric hospital, all the means available for that age to practically explore eros were put to use. The symmetry of the exposition, the simplicity of the placement of repeating elements along the walls points not so much to the harmony of a realized utopia, as to an eerie "preontological" dimension, when all meanings, being equal, create radical uncertainty, and at any moment, as in the films of David Lynch, can turn into their opposite. "The White Cube" becomes Hegel's "world night," a traumatic moment of suspension of all meanings. The question of this room can be read as a question of connection, formulated on an ontological level. What sets the form itself, the modus operandi of the existence of connection? The gap, the negativity that sets all possible series of connections, or the linking figure, the very materiality of the gap must be the supporting element of the construction? In other words, Lacan or Deleuze? How can one think of a crack that is inseparable from the workings of language itself? Or should negativity be understood not in relation to anything, but as an original positive force? The artist seems to be experimenting with both strategies. The holes in the text have found their material embodiment in his works. Does the resulting texture indicate the possibility of a new mode of communication of the oneiro-protesters, or, rather, does it hint at the fact that the underside of language will always remain for us an unreadable cipher, a trace of an alien presence, a secret writing of the trajectory of our own desire? The idea of dream protest also allows for a more down-to-earth reading. If we take into account that the main ideological background for the emergence of Motolianz's art and the artists of his generation is postmodernist Surkov propaganda, which implies any criticism within mainstream ideological clichés, as brilliantly demonstrated by one of the acclaimed masterpieces of the era, the series Sleepers (2017), then "protest in dreams" becomes almost a realistic description of the events of recent years. Uniting in a dream to get out of the game of capitalism can be interpreted less as a proposal for an alternative strategy than as a paradoxical reflection of the current social situation in Russia, where radical negativity, dangerous in its unpredictability, is subordinated to greater scrambling. Natalia Shapkina Literature: Krauss R. 2003. The Authenticity of the Avant-garde and Other Modernist Myths. Moscow: Art magazine. Freud Z. 2006. The Interpretation of Dreams. MOSCOW: STD. Zupancic A. 2003. The Shortest Shadow. Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Two. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Zupancic A. 2017. What Is Sex? Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In the photo: Semyon Motolyants' works from the "Sleepy Protest" series, 2017.