Competing Projects 2025
Aleksei Kazantsev: Relaxing ChamberDienacht Publishing
Relaxing Chamber is a continuously developing series of photographs that revolves around one common theme: the idea of consciousness in humans and animals. The images are motifs of human faces and animal forms, often not immediately recognisable. There are claws and tentacles, thrusting out, stiffened, at rest. And there are people, surrounded by a black void, some seemingly asleep, some in an ecstatic trance, others in contemplation. The project circles around the human psyche and concerns the archetypal symbolism of animals in collective unconscious memory, altered states of consciousness in trance and hypnosis, and related phenomena such as feelings of euphoria, isolation and dissociation in everyday life.
Hard velvet cover with embossed photo
Black book edges
Duotone printing (two blacks)
Foil stamping on the spine
Book in a three-quarter printed slipcase