DUNJA ZUPANČIČ :: MIHA TURŠIČ :: DRAGAN ŽIVADINOV

Russian culture is an eclectic culture which draws from different cultural sources at different historical moments. One of Russia’s traditional sources is Italy. Russian artists intentionally transform the captured formativity and transform it with their own philosophical and theoretical mass. Immediately after taking over Italian futurism in 1909, they applied their own futurism to Russian cosmism.

Futurism was abolished in 1915 with the Last futurist exhibition 0.10 by Kazimir Malevich. This is how transit futurism became Suprematism and at the same time became a critique of futurism, above all its ethical foundations.

A few years later, the same structure was repeated by Russian Constructivists. This is how in 1922 they came full circle. Russian artists based themselves on similar formal solutions as Italian futurists but on completely different ethical principles.

Suprematism and Constructivism are authentic avant-garde art movements, which materialised at “Moscow’s last underground station,” Trieste on the Italian border, where a very large number of Slavs live. When Ljubljana and Trieste were threatened by different imperial expansionisms they always defended themselves with Slav diction. That is how in 1927 in Trieste, directly in front of the fascist futurist arch, we acquired a Constructivist artwork which contained Stepančič’s congenial levitational construction. They had come full circle a second time round!