By LUSYA YANGIROVA
In December 2023, fetchish_net reimagined the heart of London’s Pushkin House into a site of fantastical disruption, queer celebration, and dreamlike transformation. Titled “Winter Special: Ordinary Miracle”, the art performance fused the sensibilities of underground rave culture with the ornate spirit of masquerade—resulting in an unforgettable experience that blurred the boundaries between performance, visual art, and participatory costume.
Rather than adhering to any staid holiday tradition, Ordinary Miracle dared to rewrite it. Guests—draped in costumes ranging from angelic to grotesque—moved through a space that felt alive, reactive, and rich in myth. The atmosphere hovered between Slavic folklore and deconstructed club aesthetics. Every corner of Pushkin House was charged with the eerie magic of a fairy tale rewritten by queers, punks, and romantics.
A Visceral Space of Performance
Among the strongest conceptual anchors of the night was the audio-reactive visual environment crafted by Anastasia Kozlova, whose work acted not merely as set design, but as a vital organ in the event’s living body. Her visuals—dreamlike yet fragmented—stitched together club culture’s rawness with the tender melancholy of traditional winter iconography. Deconstructed visuals pulsed across walls: snowy television static bled into soft candle glows, Orthodox motifs flickered beneath digital frost, and echoes of Soviet holiday broadcasts were corrupted into glitchy ephemera.
Kozlova’s approach wasn’t decorative—it was dramaturgical. Her visual curation shaped the emotional arc of the night, syncing with sound in a way that made the room feel enchanted and unstable all at once. Her manipulation of archival aesthetics—looping VHS textures, pixelated memories, bursts of chroma—invoked a kind of haunted nostalgia, collapsing time into sensation. The work offered no fixed image of winter celebration; instead, it danced between broken fragments of memory and possibility. In her hands, tradition didn’t shatter—it shimmered, refracted, and reformed.
Importantly, Kozlova’s role extended beyond the screen. As a key part of the curatorial team, managed by Zlata Mechetina, a London-based producer and curator, she helped shape the night’s rhythm—ensuring the transitions between visual, sonic, and spatial experiences flowed like a hallucination rather than a program. Her work offered continuity and rupture in equal measure, becoming the very terrain on which other elements—performance, costume, intimacy—could unfold.
In one room, a “bedroom installation” softened the spectacle. Velvet-red sheets spilled onto the floor as bodies reclined, read, and connected. Amidst the flicker of chaotic visuals, this intimate corner provided a moment of grounding—a soft cocoon within the night’s revelry. It echoed the quiet, tender moments of a holiday night: warm drinks, whispered confessions, and resting in the arms of others.
Nearby, furry mythical creatures, created by Sonya Bleiph and Marina Aleksashina, loomed with playful menace. These beings—rooted in Slavic mythology—became touchstones of the night’s core inquiry: What happens when folklore is queered, fractured, and worn like a second skin?
A Queer, Sonic Mythology
Headlining the night were two magnetic performers whose styles echoed the event’s fusion of intensity and play. Henry Spychalski, frontman of the London-based experimental group HMLTD, delivered a performance charged with theatrical abandon and an undercurrent of erotic chaos. His presence—equal parts glam, punk, and spectral cabaret—embodied the night’s fluid energy.
Equally captivating was VenesiaWorld, a deconstructed hyperpop producer from Serbia, who conjured a soundscape of dazzling digital excess. Her performance oscillated between sweetness and distortion, offering up a sonic ritual that felt both futuristic and folklore-tinged. Together, their sets constructed an alternative mythology—one rooted in rupture, glitch, and celebration.
Bodies in Rebellion and Ritual
Looking at the documentation of the event—a series of flash-lit, analog-style photographs—we are met with a tableau of poetic dissonance: a woman in sheer lace and angel wings adjusting another’s crown; two figures in whisper-close conversation, makeup smudged and eyes glittering; a clown-faced guest speaking with someone cradling Bert and Ernie puppets like talismans. These are not just party snapshots—they are glimpses into a communal rite where costume becomes language, and gesture becomes resistance.
There’s a tension in every frame—between irony and sincerity, costume and identity, excess and vulnerability. What emerges is a living carnival, not of spectacle alone, but of self-revelation. This was a night where playfulness could coexist with political edge, and myth could become queered embodiment.
The Miracle Is the Gathering
In an era where winter holidays are often co-opted by commerce and emptied of subversion, Ordinary Miracle offered something radically different: an act of joyful resistance. Fetchish_net didn’t simply throw a party; they curated a world where magic, memory, and masquerade met in a state of flux. Through costume, performance, and immersive scenography, they invited a new kind of festive ritual—one that honored intimacy, absurdity, transformation, and the ecstatic truth of collective becoming.
The miracle was not in any one object or act. The miracle was the gathering.
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