Iron Drive, performance
- 31 août 2025
- 1 min de lecture
Dernière mise à jour : 18 mai
Every act of destruction contains a decision about the future
In 1519, Hernán Cortés landed with his men on the shores of Mexico, and the expedition faced a question that allowed no neutrality: retreat or advance. Aware of his soldiers' fear and hesitation, Cortés — according to legend — ordered the ships to be destroyed, making return impossible. This gesture became a symbol of the point of no return: the moment when a decision can no longer be undone, and action demands full accountability for its consequences.
Sergey Bratkov's performance Iron Drive is conceived within that same paradigm of irreversibility, translating it into a material and bodily experience. The burning of clothing becomes a gesture of refusal — a renunciation of any possibility of returning to a prior state. It is, among other things, an image of rupture with the past, of the impossibility of reverting to a former political, historical, and psychological condition. For the post-Soviet space and for Ukraine, this motif carries particular urgency: it speaks to the physical violence of war, to the necessity of breaking with the inertia of the post-Soviet legacy, with traumatic patterns of dependency and submission. The performance considers destruction as a painful, yet sometimes inevitable, means of fixing a choice and affirming the readiness to move forward — despite risk, despite loss.
Commentaires