Dmitriy Pilikin. Lady Boss / South Russia..

All people born in Russia, since the youngest age, had a chance to compare Mikolaj Niekrasow's romantic strophes, dedicated to the Russian woman (she stops the running horse, she enters the ardent chamber), to his own portrait, gloomy and painful, inserted in the handbook.

The comparison was not good enough to the last one. Later there were women - revolutionaries, commissaries, teachers, women setting the railway-track (railway women wearing the orange waists and setting the railway-tracks), combine harvester drivers, pilots, sportswomen, cosmonauts, messengers, directors of the fabrics... Women, gently and invisibly, still keeping the Russian exterior patriarchal system, became the guards.

The project of Alena Suhowijew and Wiktor Chmielia "Lady Boss/South Russia" was created in southern cities of Russia: Krasnodar, Rostov on Don, Sochi. Women, who took power and responsibility in their hands: directors of the fabrics, managing private and public organizations and companies, are in the objective. A wish to understand how they perceive themselves being in power is the aim of this project. Except the internal strength, so indispensable to each director, it is important not to forget that the power itself is as a ritual which requires audience and "play the king". Temporal reality, its condition, needs, norms, inevitable presence to the public, the necessity of perfect role playing with partners and subordinates, capricious treated by media and necessity of reaction on its comments - these are all the component parts of this role.

Playing the role of authority, people unconsciously surround themselves with its symbols and sings. That is why the director's office becomes "the reflection" of his personality. All of these indispensable "talking" objects and symbols are in their own places and they only need to be judged as the tombs essential to effigy. It is possible, that in all of these women childhood, their parents promised them the princess future and now trying to make these "princely" demands they have to "bite the ground" every day. Even that is worth respect.

Dmitriy Pilikin.