Song of the Lost Soldier | 1

 Song of the Lost Soldier: Interview with Artist and Collector Grecht, who paints with soot, buries swords in the ground, and writes letters to nowhere

 Why are digital soap boxes a modern antiquity and how do they help to look into a world that has no name yet? What can you find during misanthropic walks along the shores of reservoirs and then turn into art? Why fasten cans to gas masks and write letters to anyone nowhere? This time the special correspondent of "Knife" Pavel Korkin talked with the artist and collector Grekht - about the wind biting the cheeks, about the rusty tumbler, about the weather vane of the future and much more.

 Pavel Korkin: Hi. Tell us who grehtsteinmann is and how it all started. How and where did you spend your childhood? Where did the military aesthetics and the song of the lost soldier, extracted sadness, sadness and hopelessness come from?

 Grecht: Hi. I got acquainted with the computer quite early and gradually began to get involved in different games, mainly RPGs and strategies. And in RPG, it was often necessary to give a name to your hero, I tried different ones, but I felt that the classic names that we know did not suit me.

 Around the same time, I got acquainted with the work of Tolkien, and there I was very interested in the race of orcs and goblins, who make weapons, armor, their names and language from garbage - in general, the way it was portrayed, I was very impressed. So Grecht is such a rude name that gradually came to me by itself. It seems to me that this combination of letters is akin to the sound of stones that roll from the top of the mountain to its foot.

 My childhood was spent mainly where I was born and live, in St. Petersburg and in the region, in the house of my family. At that time, there were many abandoned construction sites or simply foundation pits around, which for one reason or another stopped in construction. These quiet, abandoned structures of brick, rebar and concrete fascinated me.

 War has always interested me, and I grew up with some kind of constant stories about it, flipping through albums dedicated to the Second World War. It seemed that it ended quite recently.

 Often, when I came across photographs that depicted a soldier at the end of the war or after it, a prisoner returning home, this image always felt unbearable sadness, longing, trauma, detachment and something else, which is somewhere deeper ... I have experienced and continue to experience similar feelings myself, which is why this image is probably so deeply embedded.

 As a child, when I was walking among the fields, and these unfinished ruins, it seemed that it was like the end of the war: silence, summer sun and wind, and you are alone, and there is uncertainty ahead.

 It seems that there is a world, there is you, but it seems that there is nothing but memories and your own thoughts, as if you are the last living person on earth, and it is not known how long your life will last in this capacity, a day or 100 years.

 - Tell us about your “Texts” series, reminiscent of the work of Emma Hauck. Did you draw inspiration from the drawings of preschool children with schizophrenia, or perhaps from Egyptian hieroglyphic writing?

 - I was very impressed by this story with Mrs. Hauck. In general, I am very interested in the topic of madness. And yes, I am a big fan of children's creativity, I try to draw inspiration from this, but it seems to me that this door is locked with a very heavy lock at some point for a person, and I am no exception. But I do not lose hope of re-connecting with this world and at the moment I continue to look for loopholes.

 As for the texts that are more understandable to our eyes, these are some notes, scraps of letters, war reports, letters to nowhere, to those who are no longer there or who cannot be found ... The confused speech of madmen, which sometimes we can catch and have time to write down.

 Actually, the texts themselves are written in the manner of some kind of encryption - military documents, as if their author had lost his mind, and in his head thoughts, actions and fears begin to spin in a wild round dance of chaos and horror, carrying him into this abyss.