Silence No. 13 was realized in 2016 as part of the exhibition To Enter & to Permit at the Center for Creative Industries (CCI) Fabrika, Moscow.

Unfolding in a former communal apartment located in the basement of the Library on Bolshaya Pochtovaya Street (18/20, Building 13), the project shifts attention from the transformation of Moscow’s architecture to the lives shaped by this environment. Over several weeks, the artist recorded conversations with local residents about the city — thankless and difficult, yet beloved as native ground.

The recordings are concealed within six basement rooms that were once inhabited. Small everyday objects, painted white, remain suspended in the space — like monuments to an ordinary and difficult life. A multichannel sound environment brings to the surface fragments of speech and scenes from life: the voice of a woman reflecting on a youth spent in hard labour; a lullaby filled with hopes known in advance to remain unfulfilled; a mother’s farewell to her daughter; drunken conversations about life as it is. The installation turns an emptied interior into a site of residual presence, where objects and voices remain without their owners — insisting on memory rather than restoration.