As Russia self-isolates, street artist Katrin Nenasheva prepares to fill Moscow with graffiti messages to frontline workers

Because most Muscovites can’t leave their homes to see them, street artist Katrin Nenasheva posted the first few pieces from her latest project on Facebook. “An Artist in the Pandemic: Tactics and Strategies” is a collaboration between Nenasheva and fellow artist Polina Andreyeva. The project is their effort to ask how public art can continue when the public sphere itself is almost empty due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Nenasheva and Andreyeva began by asking their social media followers to share their worries about the rapidly spreading disease. The resulting phrases (“scary”; “tired of living in fear”; “I’m so lonely I could die”) ended up scattered around Russia’s capital in an unsettling graffiti series. The next step, Nenasheva said, is to collect more encouraging messages from self-isolated Russians to the city’s pharmacy staff, first responders, and food delivery workers. The artists themselves have not been self-isolating, choosing to continue their work instead.

Katrin Nenasheva

public art activist

As an artist who does art activism and works in public space, I want to understand, it’s important to me, how an artist can continue her work amid a pandemic — when the city is empty, and people are self-isolated and unsettled. What forms could fit this situation? What reactions might be appropriate for this case? Our research project, which is tentatively called An Artist in the Pandemic: Tactics and Strategies,” is a series of experimental practices that my artist colleagues (performance artist Polina Guseva, a.k.a. Polina Andreyeva, and musician Sasha Starost) and I will be putting into action this month.

Moscow really is empty. There’s a feeling of total death. And we, as artists, find it important to organize a human presence in the city. Polina and I decided to ask Muscovites (well, actually, people from various cities, not just Moscow) what messages they would want to leave around town. People sent in a range of slogans and phrases. A lot of them were tragic, at least to me: “We’re all going to die, and then there won’t be anything afterward”; “I feel bad and sad regardless of the coronavirus.”

We took that and made graffiti out of it. So far, we’ve only done a very small fraction [of the messages]. We choose [ordinarily] crowded places. We’ve been to Flacon, next to the Savelovsky train station, in the Mayakovskaya metro station area — places that are usually full of people, where life is always bubbling.

We want to extend that history. This week, we’ll be collecting messages for people who can’t self-isolate: delivery workers, pharmacy and grocery store staff, police, utilities and sanitary workers. They’ve all stayed in the city, and now, they’re the main heroes. That’s the most vulnerable category, I think. The category that’s really having a hard time. They’re our main viewers. It seems important to us to communicate with them — to leave them messages, traces. What will come of it, I don’t know yet myself. From an online perspective, this [project] is also about becoming present in some kind of living space.

Actually, a lot of people want for their self-isolation to be useful for someone else. We’re bringing together people from all around Russia to come up with collective art projects that could help them work through their experiences. We understand very well that now is a good time to create projects for people who are always in isolation, always in quarantine — people in prison, in psychoneurological institutions, in orphanages. We hope that later on, we’ll be creating the first Museum of Isolation in Russia, both online and offline.

Yesterday, we ran into some police officers. We were lucky because we hadn’t managed to put anything up [on the wall] yet. But we did sign a form — the police kept it: I, so-and-so, violated self-isolation rules for this and that reason. Our passport data is on there too, our signature, all that.

I’m not in self-isolation — for me, that’s an important principle. Because I’m a street artist. I work with people. I’m not at increased risk — I live alone, I don’t have much responsibility. For me, it’s important to be in the city. I take the usual [safety] measures: handwashing, sanitizer. But I intentionally don’t wear a mask. My mom works in a pharmacy, so I’ve known very well since I was a child that a mask only helps people who are already infected to keep from spreading the infection to other people. When I saw five people wearing masks at the beginning of the epidemic, I started feeling a little nauseous, maybe out of stress. It’s such an apocalyptic thing.