They took saws axes ropes, and went to war
On the woods. They entered dressed buckled,
And got unbuckled and undressed measured the body of the woods.
They cut marks in the eldest ones
And people silently approached the tree and at its very fingers
They began to saw the roots. The tree silently weathered
its pain, and stared into the blue distance.
It had relied on its twigs and roots.
It thought that no one would tear it from the earth.
And that its branches would fight back against the elements,
and protect its trunk.
For this purpose with every year it gave birth to more
and more new twigs.
It expected storms, and thus its roots sunk deeply.
And suddenly unnoticed on a quiet sunny day,
a man approached, with a terrible saw, and cut down
the tree. He threw a rope around it and brought the enormous body down
to his feet.
Thus the tree was defeated by a cunning man and from its body
he cut protection for himself, made fire and used the ash in the fields
for vegetables.
I was made to recall the tree by a knock on the door
“the lumber’s here.”
We went out to look at the pieces of its body.
I took an axe a splitting axe and hacked the pieces, the pieces still resisted
held on to their body didn’t want to surrender a single piece without a fight.
But my hands drove in harder and further
the iron-axe and the log broke up into splinters
Thus proud with victory I entered my house
which was warmed by the tree.
The Lumber’s Here | Drova Privezli
(Malevich, 1917, as cited in Strudler, 2016, p. 706)
Zanna Abasova’s The Lumber’s Here (Ru. дрова привезли; Tr. Odunları Getirdiler) is a short animation inspired by Kazimir Malevich’s poem of the same name. Drawing on the principles of Suprematism, the film engages with the poem’s illogical structure and experimental language, where abstraction displaces narrative causality and the material world is shaped through acts of fragmentation and reduction. Situated within the abstract horizon of the Russian Avant-Garde, Abasova’s work extends Malevich’s non-objective sensibility into animation, translating poetic violence and estrangement through a restrained visual rhythm.
Within Invisible Load, which is concerned with authority, the film foregrounds the quiet yet absolute force through which nature is measured, subdued, and transformed into utility, revealing authority not as spectacle but as an embedded and normalized act of domination. Selected as the no. II in the apartkat series, The Lumber’s Here follows the program’s opening work, “invisible load no. I: Hand of God, Ghosts, Empire”, establishing a thematic continuum that probes the intersections of material force, abstraction, and systemic authority.
by Tuncer Mert Aydın
