I Can Not Keep Silence Any More
European Parliament, Strasbourg
September 20, 1996
I will bark as a mad dog standing on all fours, together with a little calf covered with an English flag, because I can't keep silence any more'. The title of my action refers to Leo Tolstoy's article of the same name, in which the writer protests against the execution of Russian peasants, deprived of all civil rights. Just as is happening to English cows today, I am sure the monstrous act of violence directed at the other biological species will be destructive primarily for human beings. Any violence destroys our idea of democracy. The repression of «lower» classes has usually led to social cataclysms. The repression of «lower» species will lead to the global biological catastrophe. I will bark as a mad dog, because I know that if no one stops the genocide of English cows I will be the next. Then you, for sure
Oleg Kulik
As for I Cannot Keep Silence Anymore, it is as simple as that: politics always brutally brands ordinary people, like animals, leaving (burning) the traces of its landmark decisions on their bodies.
But the interesting point is that this work was done before the United Europe, in the early 1990s. The united Soviet Union was disintegrating at the moment, so the creation of another “democratic” empire looked like a Utopia against that background, and the background I chose for it was the flag of the huge global empire that had just fallen, and that just would not fit in the small Europe with its imperial mentality. More than 20 years have passed since then, the discussion of the disintegration of Europe is acquiring urgency again against the same background of the antagonistic position of “Great” Britain.
Yet, today, I see this work in a wider context as a modern political world, the struggle for survival as Charles Darwin theory has it, when systems that seem to be made for people rise and fall in the struggle with each other, but their main purpose is to satisfy the animal instincts of politicians and political parties, in fact. Ordinary people are nothing but laboratory mice in this struggle of political views they are used for experiments, branded, dividing people into our own and aliens. Social systems fall and disappear, but small people are left to bear the brands of the “majestic” victories of the past.
I Cannot Keep Silence Anymore is a feeble peep of pain uttered by a living being in the wilderness of Realpolitik. And here the important point is that this work seems to be the reverse of my other work, Your Candidate: Kulik which presents a man of high life, a politician without fear and beyond reproach, who puts his foot on HIS territory, and is ready to mark all his men with the sign of the great change.