The There You Are project explores the Spazio Ravà interior for the possibility of transforming physical space into a symbolic one, reinterpreted in the context of the body and its interaction with its living environment. Following the geometry of the rooms and the architectural and interior features, Michail Michailov arranges the exhibition by building objects similar in shape and proportions to the existing furniture. They create a minimalist but also an absurd stage on which the exhibition narrative unfolds.

Michail Michailov is an artist who, by enlisting the aid of various media (performance, drawings, video, sculpture, installation), creates meditative areas that focus on the not-so-visible aspects of human existence. The process of designing each exhibition includes transforming a specific place into a zone of thought structures that stimulate the viewer to search for words to define them.

At the core of this project lies a series of drawings, entitled Dust to Dust, on which the artist began work eight years ago. The series tracks the not-so-visible accumulation of everyday human detritus, which symbolically measures time passing in human life. The museum pedestals included in the exhibition, with brushes, broom handles, parts of vacuum cleaners attached to them, maintain a constant tension between presence and absence in the project space. Waste material, drawn with virtuosity and turned into a work of art, and the surreal museum-cleaning pedestals metaphorically construct the constant, lonely search for meaning in the narrative of everyday life.

Michail Michailov wears white medical overalls for his performances, which depersonalise the body, thereby becoming a microelement of the human cycle in a macro universe of birth and death. The idea of endless cyclicality in human existence is embedded in the Just Keep on Going video series, part of which is included in the exhibition. These videos present actions whose meaning lies in the movement itself and not the final result. They capture the artist’s interaction with a fictional dystopian living environment and his constant effort to master it.

In the There You Are project, the pavilion window is obscured by a structure where the observer must place his head in a particular opening to allow a view of the exhibition gallery. That is the Headspacing installation; it separates the body that remains outside from the head, the place where thought fields arise. In this way, the eye falls into the trap of a laboratory environment, examining the deep essential characteristics of things, where the instantaneous analysis provoked by one’s perception can hardly be verbalised.

Michail Michailov became part of his exhibition in the performance at the pavilion’s opening. His view through the Headspacing symbolises the artist’s reflection on the newly created world constructed with imaginary objects. The installation isolates the noisy, urban environment full of sensory challenges It focuses attention on a single possible view, where the immediate image is replaced by one that is the fruit of the work of consciousness. This gesture is at the core of the phenomenological bridge that allows us to transcend t­he interpretation of a particular work of art to search for ontological truth at the heart of the impulse to create art.