A room. Three hours. You, alone.
No photographer, no witness. You bring what you want and do what you want. Whatever happens in that room is your doing, and it is the work.
A machine takes 36 frames at moments none of us — you included — can predict. You can’t choose them, reshoot them, or edit them.
The finished piece, all 36 frames, is your work, under your name. You’ll see it for the first time at the opening, at the same moment as everyone else. You answer for the whole three hours, not the best of them.
Our part is only the frame: the room, the time, the ban on choosing, the number 36.
For three hours you direct everything and edit nothing. The work sits in that gap: your grip on the room against the machine’s indifference to what it catches.
- 00:00
You enter alone for 180 minutes. Watches and phones stay at the door; bring anything else you like — even another person. What happens inside is yours to answer for, all of it. The door closes.
36 exposures across the three hours. The count is announced; the moments aren’t. They are drawn, before you enter, from quantum vacuum fluctuations — physical noise the laws of nature forbid anyone to predict. No one sees the schedule; after the session, anyone can verify it was never touched.
No choosing. No reshooting. No editing, by you or the studio. All 36 are printed and shown in full, in the order taken, at one size.
You may leave at any moment. Walking out is a gesture like any other — the machine keeps firing, and an empty room is a frame too.
The camera works alone. No one selects or edits a frame: the files run untouched, straight to the press — no human eyes on the way — and nothing is shown before the opening at MONOMO.
- 03:00
The door opens; you step out. The frames stay behind. Once every artist’s session is done, the works are shown at the opening — and you meet yours there, with the public, for the first time.
- The artist
- Authors and directs the work: three hours of action. The finished 36 are theirs alone, under their name — the studio claims no part of the work.
- MONOMO
- The autonomous self-portrait studio in Gràcia. Organiser, production, place.
- Nikolai Grigoriev
- He sets the frame — the room, the hours, the ban, the number. He goes through the protocol on the same terms as everyone else.
- The machine · chance
- An indifferent eye. It fires 36 times; chance alone decides when. No one — the artist included — knows the moments. You can’t predict it, and you can’t sway it.
Take part
We invite artists. The studio decides who takes part, privately. Reasons are not given.
There is no fee to apply, and none to take part. Travel and materials are yours; the room, the machine and the printing are ours.