Trans-Siberia

Trans-Siberia - 2019

Aquarium, plastic, fishes

This project acts as a critique of totalitarian governments’ attempts to control the gender and orientation of their population. Fedotov-Fedorov alludes to manmade ecosystems, such as national parks, reservations, zoos, and aquariums, which, with their “living content”, represent a model of the human desire to dominate nature. However, despite humans’ best efforts to control the inhabitants of a closed system, they cannot achieve total control. The transparent container in this work is inhabited by fish which can change their gender depending on the distribution within their ecosystem. At the beginning of the show, there were 10 fishes total, all female. During the show, 4 of the fishes became male.