A preposition is a word explaining a relation to another word. And perhaps no preposition is as central to Slavs and Tatars’ specific cosmology as the word ‘from,’ given our interest in historiography, research, and genealogy. The preposition ‘from’ also indulges our anti-modernist posture—facing the past but moving forward towards the present, like Molla Nasreddin, the 13th century Sufi wise-man-cum-fool, often depicted riding backwards on his donkey.
Literally ‘from’ in several Slavic languages, the preposition Ѿ or ot used to exist in old Church Slavonic as a Cyrillic letter unto itself. OPP tries to restore this ligaturial luxury—a combination of the Greek Omega and Theta—through a meditation on the preposition’s more carnivalesque tenor.