Corrosion

SH-ARTGROUP

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Corrosion (from Latin, corrosio – erosion, gnawing) and ball bearing "labeled" with the state symbols of the Soviet Union, these are the main components of this sculpture created according to the principle of metaphorical similarity (from Greek μεταφορά  – “transfer," "figurative meaning").

The composition represents a mechanical object, a symbolic "portrait" of the vanished but once powerful industrial state whose people made a significant and irrefutable contribution to the victory over Nazism. It has become the most significant event in the history of the state, its highest triumph.

During the Second World War the USSR was the only European country to equip all its machines with bearings of its own manufacture. They rotated in every tank, aircraft, cannon, hospital train, contributing to the approaching end of Nazism.

Today this vanished country is metaphorically viewed as a powerful super-strong steel construction which did not break under unprecedented pressures from the outside but could not stand the internal pressure. Corrosion of metal visualizes the process of degradation of the Soviet system. The mechanism was still rotating, the separator ring with flags of fifteen Soviet republics was still holding together these balls, rolling bodies moving together in a closed circle, but the load was increasing, micro-cracks widening, and the weakened links were breaking apart unable to withstand the growing separatism.

On the outer ring of the bearing, the text of the Soviet national anthem is given: "Unbreakable Union of freeborn Republics, Great Russia has welded forever to stand…" These words were familiar from childhood to all Soviet people; they promised them a bright future and turned out to be a figment. But "nothing passes traceless...". They remained inside us, became part of our self-identity.

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