"Seeing the invisible": A St. Petersburg resident spent 13 years collecting hairpins lost on the streets.
Now Nikita Sivushkin He is looking for a new owner or a museum for his collection. Currently, it comprises 15 hairpins and bobby pins, which he and his friends found on the streets of St. Petersburg, as well as other cities in Russia and around the world.
"My invisible ones need a more stable habitat than my incomprehensible apartments. I imagine it as some kind of venue: a museum, a hotel(?)... a bar," пишет Nikita in a message on the classifieds website.
Sivushkin picked up his first invisible object on November 11, 2012—the day “when Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard (the Danish writer—ed.) were born and died one after another.” Three years later, he classified what he had found and wrote training manual for collecting invisible objects. One literature teacher from Pavlovsk showed it to her students "as an example of contemporary Russian literature."
"It was a great achievement for me to break into the world of literature. There are people who can't write, but they have something to write about. And there are those who can write, but they have nothing to write about. I think I belong to the second option, but with the help of invisible people, I can absorb both," explained Nikita in an interview with "Paper".
Nikita spent ten years collecting his collection "philosophical performances" hairpin-hunting tours in St. Petersburg and Moscow, made a mini-exhibition of the finds and created map found invisible ones.
For Nikita, searching for lost hairpins is a way to ridicule established notions and show people a different perspective on everyday things, where a rusty piece of iron on the pavement can be seen as a piece of life or a reason for sincere communication.
Nikita is not going to end the story with the hairpins and stop picking them up.
"Isn't it nice, perhaps, to find pieces [of someone else's personality]. Besides, it's also a matter of the most stupid language game. In this case, only in Russian can you say you see something invisible."
