Central to my work is the exploration of how being in a certain place and the way one moves between places become tools for changing one's inner reality and the reality around one. In many of my media projects (film, video art, sound art, online walks), I have worked and am working with the notion of walking and drift ("la derive" - from french situationist theory) as a particular way of thinking about the world (and thus transforming the world); as an artistic, philosophical and psycho-practice.
I've been practicing drifts ( since I was a kid, I just didn't call them that then. Back then they were teenage walks, during which I would reflect on myself and reflect on the world around me, withdrawing into myself Only recently have I realized that these walks were my form of "running away from home".
The drift is for me the main way of artistic cognition of reality. Drift as I understand it is an act of philosophy and thought. Through walking, I do not simply cognize the space around me, but also produce new truths, theses, critical maxims, and other instruments of meaning and being, through which I change reality.
It is a two-way process without a final result, since the route and the place influence the course of reflection, but also the questions that are important to the individual allow new meanings to be given to the places seen. In this process, the subject finds himself at the boundary between the general and the particular, the point from which he interacts with reality.
In a certain sense the concept of drift is close to that of trip. Trips are like forms of transformation of the subject. Trip is always directed into the unknown, into the new, that is, into the unrepresentable. My drift is always directed toward finding "empty places" in which to make contact with the "unrepresentable. The unrepresentable can be understood both as a philosophical category, as a spiritual category of psychic life, and as a political category - that which is unrepresentable.
I am now actively working with painting, trying to engage with the unrepresentable by trying to depict it. Depicting the unrepresentable is a task that resonates with one of the mottos of the Situationists who invented the theory of drift and psychogeography. They said: be realistic, demand the impossible. I am trying to accomplish what is impossible: to imagine the unimaginable.
Dmitry Stepanov 