Lonely Series: Volga
Medium: Stereoscropic picture, plywood framing
Edition: Limited edition of 5 + 2 AP (large)
Size: 100 x 100 x 20cm
Edition: Limited edition of 15 + 2 AP (small)
Size: 48 x 48 x 10cm
Year: 2026
In a traffic jam on the ring road, like a dull, throbbing toothache, time ties itself into a dead loop and begins to bite its own tail.
In that very same traffic jam ahead of me (this is the mid-2000s), there stands a Volga, a legend of Soviet-era roads — not the kind retro enthusiasts acquire for its chic, but the kind people survive with.
On the back seat of the car, anguish is battering a little girl. Anguish will not let her sit facing forward. Anguish hurls her into hysterics. Anguish has already drained all her tears — there is no moisture left now, only convulsions.
I sit there, just as trapped, just behind the girl’s Volga — but the girl cannot see me. She exists in a separate relationship with the world, on the far side of which there is some hand, and from time to time that hand tries to lower the girl back onto the seat — but it’s no use.
The car shudders, the headlights flare and fade again, and for a moment the girl falls back, slipping out of my field of vision — only to return with fervour to her window, like a large, long-legged crane fly whose only destiny is to hurl itself in delirium toward the light.
I will see different stages of despair pass across that face, but I will hear nothing — as though the sound has been switched off for me — and so I will begin to piece it together: every dehydrated groan and every thin sob, every cry from the mother in the back seat and the father’s bark from the front, the unstoppable spasms of her hysteria.
Some meters of time will pass. We will remain where we are, just as we were — but separation will be appointed to us: into the line between the car in which I am confined and the girl’s Volga a reckless, dishevelled truck will wedge itself, a torn strip of tarpaulin flapping loose from its side.
I will never see that Volga again, nor that girl — nor will that time ever return. Yet it will remain ours forever: that time, and that stretch of frenzied highway paved with her dry tears.