I came to work with the residence at CCI Fabrika in 2016. From its very beginning, the programme was tailored to host international artists — those, whose ideas of Russia and Russian contemporary art could have been both vague and clear, who wanted to understand a new context and build up a research, artwork, or a project in dialogue with locals. It is impossible to name and reflect on the conversations and relationships with everyone whom I was happy to encounter over the last 8 – 9 years. We had artists coming from Brazil, Estonia, Finland, the USA, Austria, the Netherlands, France, Italy, and Switzerland, to name a few. Yet there are some whom I want to sculpt with words in this text and leave, therefore, a picture, of what might have been a thin and delicate bridge that was possible to forge — so recently — together.

In 2017, a Brazilian photographer, artist, and researcher Lucas Gervilla came to Fabrika. His idea was to reveal and brush off the notion and remaining ‘monuments’ of abandoned places: what they are, how they remain, what space they take in personal and collective memory, how we relate to these ruins, and what they stand for once encountered? Lucas outlined a list of places he was intrigued to visit — abandoned towers, monuments of constructivism, buildings, and places left uninhabited. Starting from this, we made a trip together to an empty pioneer camp outside of Moscow. Left alone in the forest, it remained as a fossil so familiar to those of us who were growing up in the late Soviet and early post-Soviet period.

While searching for it, jumping over the fence, and crawling under an almost deconstructed concrete staircase to find the pioneer-themed mosaics in a big dormitory hall, Lucas was searching for the ground that could form and compare the reflection and experience of the abandoned place. This trip and this research grew into something much bigger. In 2019, Lucas made a show Exposição Abandonamento: Brasil/Rússia while continuing to build up a vast visual base for his conceptual research. In 2025, Lucas defended his PhD research Aesthetics of Abandonment: Abandoned Places, Ruins, Memory and Art (by Lucas Rossi Gervilla, 2025) at the University of Greifswald (Germany). His work with the topics of abandoned places and the notion of memory connected to them has never stopped, as well as the friendship that emerged over these years and our dialogue.

In 2018, Fabrika and the Austrian Cultural Forum in Moscow agreed to collaborate and invite 4 Austrian artists every year to come and work at Fabrika’s residency. As a result, for at least 2,5 years, we had an opportunity to host and work with filmmakers, artists, performers, and architects coming from different parts of Austria — and beyond.

The projects and artistic interests of all of them are valuable on their own: for instance, filmmaker and educator Axel Stockburger directed and made a film over the period of his 3-months residency based on his research and reflection on Alexander Bogdanov’s book “The Red Star” (1908). The screening of the film took place in the Agency of Singular Investigations (Anna Titova and Stas Shuripa) — leading to a thought-provoking conversation with Axel and the students of the Institute of Contemporary Art.

Vasilena Gankovska, an artist from Bulgaria based in Vienna, has made a vast collection of drawings of the old Soviet movie theaters which were about to — and some of them already had been — be demolished to be turned into a new and modern network of cinemas. Vasilena traveled from one cinema to the other, meticulously sketching, and memorising the images of the past that were about to be forgotten. A result of this process was a personal show at the apartment of Simon Mraz, then head of the ACF, and later, a participation in the project In Situ (2019, curated by Anna Kozlovskaya and Christina Pestova) where Vasilena’s care to the outskirts’ cinemas was accompanied by the peer artists’ projects aimed at careful study of the Moscow’s suburbs.

In 2021, the last artist from this programme came to visit and work at Fabrika’s residency. Andrea Seidling, architect, curator, and filmmaker decided to conduct research about an almost forgotten history of the Moscow period of Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, the first female architect in Austria. Margarete was an active communist and was among the few German and Austrian architects who came to Russia to work in the new emerging Soviet state. The traces of this residency are almost lost these days yet the house where Margarete used to live still stands in the labyrinths of old Moscow. Andrea has tracked these traces and collected the scrapes of them to turn them into a future film project.

Yet not only visual artists have stayed and worked at Fabrika. In 2018, I met Stephanie Rosianu, a media artist and poet whose practice was embedded in the poetical range of contemporary art. A Conversation Between You and Me, a personal exhibition Stephanie made at Fabrika, the artist presented a series of embroidery, an installation, and a booklet with publications, the theme of which was conversation.

A few months later, in the late spring of 2019, an American artist and educator Kristi Lippire came to work at Fabrika’s residence. During her stay at the residence, Kristi Lippire studied the works of the outstanding Soviet avant-garde artist, designer, and bright representative of constructivism — Varvara Stepanova. Inspiration from the work of Varvara Stepanova has grown into the artist's study of constructivism, interest in modernist architecture, and how its constructive forms can be (re)formed with the help of color.

What started as a study of archives and outlining thoughts of making a sculpture of Stepanova turned into a vast collection of photographs of those architectural objects that were created without color: these are elements of the design of modernism (American brutalism) and geometry of Soviet constructivism. Lippire selected these design elements and created special patterns from them. Being a professor in the field of color theory, Lippire offered to turn color into language to create a dynamic system where two coexisting codes — form and color — could be revealed in one abstract system.

Finally, the last person I want to mention here is Neeka Allsup, an artist from Saint Louis (USA), engaged in painting and street art. Neeka came to Moscow at a time when no one thought it was possible — in the hot summer of 2024 and immediately immersed herself in the process of meeting, learning, and understanding the context she found herself. Neeka gave a public talk to Fabrika’s viewers and left us with a beautiful mural work emerging as if from the outer world on one of Fabrika’s backside walls.

So what is a residency? Can I pin it down to exhibitions, projects, and talks we have made throughout the years I was curating the programme? As fluid as it can be, the notion and physical presence of it is seeping through the fingers if one is trying to hold it still. Yet the subtle touch of our connections stays, leaving a feeling of a so–much-needed-these-days handshake.