And the starry sky above our heads

Gor Chahal: The idea of the project came to me against the background of current events related to Ukraine. The images of stars (ornamented crosses) on the maforia of the Most Holy Theotokos, appearing on iconographic images since the XIII century during the spread of the mystical teachings of the Hesychasts, are printed on silk fabric with endless horizontal and vertical rapport. The video shows the same hierography, but in a movement inward. On the one hand, the name here combines Kant's "moral law and the starry sky", on the other – a prayer to the Mother of God to protect us with her honest Veil from all evil in these eerie and until recently simply unimaginable times. In June 2023, making a pilgrimage to the Church of St. Nicholas in the Lycian Worlds, we providentially met with an old friend Kamil, whom we had not seen since the late 80s after his emigration from Russia, and spent a wonderful evening in the ancient Lycian town of Habes. As a result, this collaboration arose.

Kamil Tchalaev: This hymn to the Virgin (Ave Maria) was composed in Berlin, in the western district of Neukölln, on paper, in 2011, and later that year in Paris recorded at a home studio. The composer resorts to the ancient metric system and the contradictions between stressed and weak syllables in the feet. In the mid-1980s, together with Gore and others (in particular, Alexander Butusov, known as the poet Bassoon, now deceased), both protagonists created an alternative nonconformist theater post in Moscow, which held fifteen actions on various stages of the city and region until 1986, in particular at the Yermolova Theater and the School of Dramatic Art. In 1989, Chalaev went to Paris to study, where he then began to live and work. 38 years later, on the territory of ancient Lycia, in the town of Kash on the coast in June 2023, a new meeting of Gor and Kamil with their families took place. It was decided that it was necessary to resume joint creative activity at a new level, as a result of which the somewhat forgotten soundtrack of the trio of the Virgin acquires new meanings in connection with modern iconography and work on the spiritual eidos of Gor Chahal. May peace reign on earth.