Helplessness

In the project Helplessness, Ekaterina explores street ads as an outdated method of sharing information that continues to exist despite digital alternatives. The boundaries between past and present — their simultaneous existence and reproduction — raise questions about time as a place, and about the helplessness of humans in the face of time’s totality.

By connecting her personal family history of alcoholism with the overwhelming number of ads offering help to those struggling with alcohol and drug addiction, the artist concludes the project with a street art piece titled My Father’s Drinking Binge Schedule — a work that, sadly, remains just as relevant today.
In the project, Ekaterina uses painting, street art, public space interventions, and photography.

 “What kind of street ads do I see most often? Help for alcoholics and drug addicts. They’re pasted everywhere. Sometimes several on one spot. I’ve even seen them glued near the ground, at the base of lamp posts. As if, crawling through the street in a heavy alcoholic haze, I could still see the life-saving phone number. In minus 35°C, that seems especially grotesque.

 I started collecting these ads. Watching the people who put them up, talking to them. Learning about the organizations that offer help to those with addictions.
 I began to see how much lies behind these worn-out pieces of paper.
 I started thinking about my own relationship with addiction. What is addiction? What is help? Where are the boundaries of help? And where does the feeling of helplessness live?
 I copied the ads onto canvases, imitating their tearing from walls and playing with colors. I wanted to make them bright and visually engaging — as if the magic of color could heal the world and help those with addictions.
 Then I photographed them, printed smaller versions, and pasted them around like real ads. I watched how people reacted.”

2018–2021

At the end of this project, I created a large-scale version of an ad offering help to the homeless, alcoholics, and drug addicts — painted on a wall. I added the prefixes and suffixes “helpless-” to the word “help” in Russian (Помощь → Беспомощность), and placed nearby a quote on helplessness from Lao Tzu — used by Nikolai Leskov in The Jester Pamfalon and by Andrei Tarkovsky in the film Stalker:

 “Weakness is great, strength is insignificant.When a person is born, they are weak and flexible.When they die, they are strong and rigid.When a tree grows, it is tender and pliable, but when it becomes dry and brittle — it dies.Rigidity and strength are companions of death.Flexibility and weakness express the freshness of being.Therefore, what has hardened will not win.”

Initially, the quote was printed and pasted on the wall — at night.I came back in the morning to photograph it — and it was gone.In its place, the same text was handwritten in marker next to the ad.That’s how it went.

Irkutsk, 2021