Opalima Kupina: Liège episode. A Stop Pavilion: On the Soft Underbelly of Europe

An installation presenting an abandoned, dilapidated office/studio that once belonged to a "decolonial" detective who apparently filmed videos for an unknown YouTube channel. The work traces the fragmented biography of detective M.: after severe frostbite (losing two toes) in late 2019, he was evacuated from Khmelnytskyi to Cairo, then Paris. He traveled to Bulgaria, drinking in restaurants and telling strangers about a secret mission for unidentified intelligence services. In Liège, he devoted himself to studying the Odesssa Tram Company and Palermo trams. The piece opens with the quote: "We work at night, we do everything possible. Doubt is our passion, and passion is our mission."

The abandoned studio literalizes interrupted projects and lost narratives. This is a darkly comic meditation on how Eastern European artists navigate Western expectations of trauma performance while actually just trying to survive—turning decolonial theory into a punchline about tramways, exile into mundane research, and resistance into heartache and confusion.