I'm genuinely honoured to receive the Lumen Prize this year and I couldn’t be more grateful to everyone I collaborated with on this series of works. I'm saddened and perhaps even devastated I wasn't given a chance to attend the ceremony. The UK Immigration bureaucracy considered my visa application to not be straightforward, which leads to undefined duration in processing time. As a holder of a Russian passport, for the past 14 years, I have been wrestling with the western immigration bureaucracy, while living, studying, and working in England, Austria, Sweden, and Japan. I was on this escapist train, looking for a place, where I could be inspired and focus on my work, running away from unjustness and limits on what I could possibly do, should I have chosen to remain in my home country. I think many of us agree that art and culture can and should operate across borders as a humanist project in the first place. And what are borders anyway? What are international policies that regulate them? A set of very old political ideas that emerged as a result of decades—long wars, famously formulated in a Peace of Westphalia treaty? A seriously old doctrine from the seventeenth century, still serving as a model for running the world? Although perhaps we have more novel ideas and models of organising, dividing, scaling and addressing it, one of which is the internet. As a planetary infrastructure, it suggests a very different political model of participation to what was derived from the nation states. I naturally became native to it, being able to operate across borders and limits posed by the dark bureaucratic aspect of my life. Evidently, to this date, the nation state relationships keep producing a lot of distress and sorrow. It’s an honour to receive my award in the crypto category; crypto and web3 as a set of technological stacks built on top of the internet and arguably leading its next evolutionary phase. I hope one day we will have a lot less of these tangible and limiting borders to enjoy more of what we can of being humans. I would like to dedicate this award to the past and future of a free and unrestricted Internet.
