“Unlike the poet Khlebnikov, who declared himself chairman of the globe, I urge you to feel like a globe.

Everywhere is my eternal home, my endless body.”
Fedir Tetyanych

Through these works, we wish to conceive an informative and striking exhibition. Hopefully one day, this will be made possible. For now, what we are able to present to you is an open archive of the rescued works, an archive that has yet to acquire a clear structure.

The works of Ukrainian artist Fedir (Feodosiy) Tetyanych are threatened, though not only by rocket fire. For decades, these objects and forms, which can be divided into collages, assemblages, sculptures, installations, costumes, sketches, and paintings, were disintegrating. They were made from found materials following the artist’s ecological approach, and were not meant to exist forever. Having not received enough public attention to be preserved and restored, they gradually turned into garbage, returned to the landfill from which Tetyanych had once taken out elements for the conception in the first place.

There is very little information about Tetyanych who died in 2007. The known fragments of his biography are unsystematic and partially mythologized. These myths began during the artist’s lifetime and were, in fact, driven by his own efforts. The physical decay of his works and the uncertain nature of the knowledge surrounding them became elements of a rather effective machine of forgetting. Tetyanych kept secret the meaning of the word “Frypulya”— another version of “Fripulya”— which was his pseudonym as well as the name of a worldview system that combined elements of cosmism, ecological thinking, and transhumanism, and involved blurring the boundaries of one’s self. In a network of multilevel connections between human and nonhuman elements, “everywhere is my eternal home, my endless body,” he wrote in his poem-manifesto. Postulates from this poem, garbage sculptures, projects of “biotechnospheres” (individual modules for the existence of the human body in the future), street actions and performances, and all other signs of Tetyanych’s presence appear as manifestations, under which the existence of a hidden system can be located, its scale and integrity remaining in the realm of speculation.

Fedir Tetyanych was born in 1942 in the Kyiv region. From 1961 until 1966, he studied at the Kiev Art Institute, and quickly became a monumental artist. He carried out state orders to design public spaces—institute lobbies, factory checkpoints, facades of educational institutions, public transport stops—in the USSR and the RSFSR. In the 1970s, he began to develop the doctrine of “Fripulia-infinity,” an open system in which clothing could be an extension of the human body, houses an extension of clothing, and spaceships an extension of houses under constant transformation. The earth and everything that grows out of it in this system are a continuation of the soil that covers the artist’s canvas, and the planets are depicted as the organs of his own body. Later, in the 1980s and 1990s, elements of this system built up to the biotechnosphere; the recycling of all possible used materials, the reorganization of industrial production as a public spectacle (the idea of ​​a “theater factory”), and street actions in costume orchestrated through plays, sermons, and visual demonstrations to render the theory of “Fripulia” effective. In the late 1980s experimental works of the artist began to be exhibited publicly. In the 1990s and 2000s, he often appeared as a performer during the performances of independent alternative music groups, becoming a cult figure for a new generation of artists and musicians. But the opportunity to earn an income with monumental orders vanished with the disappearance of the USSR. Tetyanych was not involved with the new mechanisms of the private art market nor did he receive institutional support. The artist survived by selling potatoes in the market, which he grew on his village plot. Even so, his practice of artistic transformation of everyday life did not stop until his death.