‘Taking over Andrejsala’s former paintball field, Anastasia Sosunova makes a series of interventions into the site’s existing structures. The field, mimicking a small town with a variety of obstacles and buildings, including houses and a church, was constructed in wood by the paintball business and left in place when they departed the site. Sosunova treats this field “as a ready made”, while reforging its history; she inserts sculptural elements that form the traces of a fictional community that lived through games, communicated by shooting paint, turning myths into reality.
This inhabitation takes shape through a collection of uncanny elements, including cast and modified household furniture, baked salt dough, metal and resin-coated sculptures and assemblages of found objects from the area. The embellishment of these domestic and public spaces bring the mocks village one degree closer to reality. As Sosunova notes, “an urban paintball field is a conceptual field, where wooden box structures stand in for a neighbourhood, representations of the political, socio-economic, cultural tensions happening in human habitats”. The paintball field is a 1:1 scale representation, where the neighbourhood is reconstituted as a site of explicit conflict, which is to be resolved through play.’
https://saliva.live/anastasia-sosunova
