Klaxon. My Dear Sweet Friend (2022)

The audience puts on a VR headset and enters the intimate world of memories and thoughts of a woman. The experience is a journey through the mind and lifetime of the protagonist. This immersive story bridges cinematic and theatre experiences and employs gaze-interactive visual poetry. The visual narrative unfolds in the subconscious state between dream and wake. In her childhood, she meets a girl, and they become close friends, but the girl suddenly disappears. This event dramatically affects the protagonist's life: she cannot escape the fantasies about her friend. Later, she moves to a big city to model for painters and makes a successful career as an artist. However, getting older, she still struggles with obsessive ideas about her childhood friend. Eventually, she realizes that the stress of experiencing society's oppression at a young age forced her to extinguish her black identity to be accepted by an oppressive society. Therefore, a viewer contemplates the woman's life-long process of becoming. This project, initiated by US-based artists born in Russia, is addressed to contemporary white immigrants in the United States. To reveal the harmful impacts of white supremacy on the consciousness level, creators draw from their research on US history, identity politics, intersectionality, and consciousness studies, as well as in-depth interviews conducted with black studies scholars, artists, and community members.