The Strangest Person I Know: Leonid Kotelnikov

This story is from the spring 2025 edition of VICE magazine: THE ROCK BOTTOM ISSUE. To subscribe to receive 4 print issues of our newly relaunched magazine each year, click here.

THE STRANGEST PERSON I KNOW is a new VICE magazine column, in which we interview strange people and then ask them who the strangest person they know is so we can interview them too, creating a never-ending daisy chain of spiraling human strangeness in an increasingly square world.

First up is Leonid Kotelnikov, a 31-year-old artist from Moscow who’s been living in exile since Putin’s escalation of violence in Ukraine. He’s marauded through 30 European countries, playing inscrutable music, hanging naked from balconies, and painting his face with glue while staying with friends and fans or sleeping rough beneath the stars.

His current performance persona, fake_trailers, recently played an interesting sounding show in the basement of a London squat. I caught up with him afterwards to see how it went.

VICE: Hi, Leonid. You’re not what I was expecting. You seem like a warm, engaging person.
Leonid Kotelnikov: Sometimes people who see my shows think that in real life, I will be kind of crazy too. Sometimes I can be: Two days ago, I was playing a show here in London, and I got some slimy enemas from my ass. I had a pig mask on my face, and I tried to… fuck, I don’t know this word, when you hang on a rope…

Hanging? Choking?
I was burning my head [with fire]. I still have burns here on my ear, and some of my hair is damaged. But anyone who’s afraid to know me, if we talk, they will change their mind.

What was the thing with the enemas?
I went into a toilet at the venue and poured a liter of water inside my ass to make it clean. By the time I needed to perform, I was ready to make a huge water bomb. It looked a little bit scary for people; some of this water from my ass with some slime poured on their brand new clothes.

“I’m on my way to heaven, or maybe to hell, and I don’t think that anything can stop me.”

Okay. How would you describe this event?
It’s a regular event in the basement of my friend, Piotr. He’s squatted an interesting building in London for years, and once every few months, he creates a night of strange and interesting performances. I saw I was not the only one there in a pig mask, doing enemas.

Really? There were more pig-mask enema-people there?
Actually, the enemas were just me. Some people did douches, though.

So what were you doing? Just like, singing, shouting, screaming?
I didn’t sing anything. My mouth was creating only one sound, it was like [he blows into a small clown instrument]. So it was like, clown-y interactions with listeners. At first, I was in this piggy mask with some other things on me that made me completely blind and deaf, and I didn’t really do anything apart from pull myself on this rope and create some enemas on the ground. But then I started some strange interactions with people who were there by setting fire to my head.

You’ve been traveling across Europe since the Ukraine invasion in 2022, and you’ve essentially been homeless throughout this trip, right?
Yeah. In that time, I’ve paid to sleep somewhere only three times. First, it was Kazakhstan, then I spent a year moving from Georgia to Armenia to Serbia to anywhere else I could go without a visa. Then I started my [Western] European and British tour. I moved through 100 towns in a year, sometimes sleeping on the streets because it’s more interesting for me than to just stay at somebody’s cozy apartment. It’s extremely interesting for me to check out all the strangest caves where I can get my body unstuck. All the places that will never be on TripAdvisor.

How long will you keep living like this?
I was thinking about this a few days ago. Everybody I know who got out of Russia, and were extremely homeless like me, after some months, they stopped the adventure. Some of them went back to Russia. Some of them are living in some other country. But me? I don’t know. I’m on my way to heaven, or maybe to hell, and I don’t think that anything can stop me.

Many thanks to Online Lipnem for introducing us to Leonid and his oeuvre.

This story is from the spring 2025 edition of VICE magazine: THE ROCK BOTTOM ISSUE. To subscribe to receive 4 print issues of our newly relaunched magazine each year, click here.