With a Single Letter

"With a Single Letter" is the fourteenth and final public art project, created in the coldest city in the world, Norilsk.

Ice here is not just a material or a natural phenomenon, but part of the city’s identity. Starting in November, almost every cultural venue and café puts up ice sculptures: castles, Father Frosts, fairy-tale and pop-culture characters. Ice sculpture is a familiar visual language for Norilsk residents, an essential part of the winter landscape that lasts until April. By working with this material, the project team chose to stay within this medium familiar to the city, but to shift the focus — from image to word.

The ice text sculpture appeared outside the Norilsk Polar Drama Theater named after Mayakovsky — a site of historic importance for the city. Creative groups first emerged here back in the Norillag years: the future theater’s first season took place in 1940–1941 in the canteen of the 2nd camp division. The current theater building was completed in 1987 and has since become one of the city’s main cultural landmarks. In winter, an ice town is traditionally built on the square in front of it — Bazelevs’s sculpture blended naturally into this context.

The first troupe of the Mayakovsky Theater. Source: northdrama.ru

Communication of Norilsk residents in urban space

In Bazelevs’s work, there is a subtle irony in the mismatch between what is written and what it means: to say something "with a single letter", several words are still required. This paradox points to the nature of communication — sometimes a single sign really is enough to be understood. Everyone also has their own special letter. For Bazelevs, it is "B": he signs his works with it, both in the studio and in public space. For T-Bank, it is "T". And for someone else, it might be an "N" at the end of a long-awaited letter.

The process of creating the sculpture

As part of the project, the team also held a public talk. Vasily Bazelevs spoke about his artistic practice and his impressions of working in Norilsk, while creative producer Maria Ushakova discussed the phenomenon of public art and its wide variety of genres.

On site, the team first leveled the ground using compacted snow. Then the ice blocks were laid horizontally, forming the foundation for the future letters. To keep the structure stable, each block was trimmed on site and sealed with water — which in the frost acted as a natural glue. Once the base was ready, the sketch was transferred onto the ice. Each letter was set strictly to level, with attention to scale and proportion. After that, the rough carving began: at this stage the text could already be read, though the forms were still coarse.

Next, a comb tool was used to shave off the rough layer and give the letters clarity. The surfaces of each letter were then scraped sharp and evened out on both sides to achieve a clean silhouette.

The final stage was the installation of lighting. Channels were cut inside the structure for LED lamps, which were placed deep into the ice. The lighting not only highlights the form but also makes the text visible during the polar night, turning the sculpture into a luminous signal in the middle of the winter city.

As with many things in Norilsk, the process of creating the sculpture depended on nature: first, the team had to wait for the lake ice to solidify and reach a thickness of 25–30 centimeters. Only then could they begin preparing the material.

The ice was cut with special equipment into neat blocks measuring 1×2 meters. Each block was lifted from the water with a manipulator and placed onto a truck for transport. One block weighed between 300 and 500 kilograms, and a total of 25 were needed — about 7 tons of crystalline material.