Desperate Distortion Studio

projects / 2024

Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine began on 24 February 2022. Alongside the military assault, the Kremlin launched an extensive propaganda campaign to shape the narrative of the war. Although Mexico condemned the invasion, on 1 March 2022 President Andrés Manuel López Obrador ruled out imposing economic sanctions on Russia and criticized what he described as the censorship of Russian state media.

Two and a half years into the war, Rafał Milach established the Desperate Distortion Studio in Mexico as a symbolic response to this political stance. Acting alone, with limited means and no real agency in global politics, he subjects Vladimir Putin's televised address of 24 February 2022 to a process of visual disintegration. The speech is broken down into several thousand individual frames, each altered through artistic intervention. In parallel, visual and sound artist Łukasz Dziedzic disrupts the audio track of the propaganda broadcast. The resulting animation is accompanied by a flipbook of more than 3,000 pages—an object whose scale renders it impossible to leaf through.

Animation 3'15"

Visuals © Rafał Milach 2024 , Sound © Łukasz Dziedzic 2024

Współfinansowano ze środków Krajowego Planu Odbudowy dla kultury.