[Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe:] For example, when I first dressed up as Putin, I had the feeling that I had become some kind of colossal totemic maggot, which was about to burst from the shit it had eaten.

At the same time, I was not a villain, but a “forest sanitation worker” [sanitar lesa: animals such as ants, birds, wolves, badgers, etc., who “sanitize” their environment as predators and scavengers, are called sanitary lesa] and I had to devour our deceased country, the great Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, as soon as possible, so that a new life could begin as soon as possible.

[Interviewer:] Do you think he’ll consume us after all?

[Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe:] Yes, and quite soon. You know, in Bali, where I have lived for a very long time, there are lots of different parasites — wood beetles and termites. A luxurious teak cabinet in the style of the Dutch masters stands in the house. You use it every day, you have clothes hanging in it, but at some point you touch it — and it crumbles. It has simply been devoured. That’s what will happen to our country.

Thanks to Andrey Silvestrov for the quotation. I traced it to an Afisha magazine interview that it is no longer accessible. The passage as quoted here I found on Andrei Amalgin’s LiveJournal blog. Amalgin, in turn, cites this 2013 LiveJournal blog post about the late great performance artist Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe. The image above, from the 2005 series of staged photographs entitled StarZ, is courtesy of Mutual Art. Translated by the Russian Reader