Two weeks residency: Bodies as Lands — Sociotechnical Imaginaries and Spatial Arrangements in Eastern Europe
- Published on Thursday, 09 March 2023 10:44
|
Curonian Spit, Landsat Oli 9, retrieved: March 2023. Bodies as Lands - Sociotechnical Imaginaries and Spatial Arrangements in Eastern Europe
March 13–26, 2023
Nida Art Colony of the Vilnius Academy of Arts
Participants: Ann Mirjam Vaikla, Darya Tsymbalyuk, fantastic little splash, Ilona Jurkonytė, Miruna Dunu, ruїns collective
Curated by Asia Bazdyrieva and Egija Inzule
As cultural practitioners in Eastern Europe we oftentimes face the limitations of theoretical frameworks developed in Western Europe and North America. Departing mainly from a critique of western modernity and coloniality which enabled capitalism and subsequent environmental and racial injustice, these forms of critique are not directly applicable to the contexts of Eastern Europe and its states that were a part of the Soviet modernity, back then operating within different economic and political models. Situated between imperial powers—coming from Western Europe and the Russian Empire—the lands of these states have been subjected to colonial and neo-colonial gazes that mapped and visualized these territories in their own ways, while rendering them into sites of material transactions and operational spaces where bodies, lands, living and non-living matter were cast as resources.
Through an open call that took place in December 2022, NAC was looking for cultural practitioners researching the Baltic States to join a two-week residency at NAC in Nida, Lithuania. The residency will provide participants with the opportunity to connect, exchange and share their practice with a small number of practitioners from Ukraine and the Baltic States. The goal of the residency is to look together at various specific sites—be it the Curonian Spit in Lithuania, Donbas in Ukraine, or approximations, such as Eastern Europe—and to think about the longer histories of sociotechnical imaginaries and spatial arrangements that inscribe themselves in bodies and lands, imagined as a component of material exchange.
By securing time to be and think together, the intention is to collectively reflect on gaps in knowledge that obscure or mute these territories, their histories, and the material aspects of colonial rendering of these lands into a resource. The goal is to address the sociotechnical arrangements and spatial organizations that enable slow violence and environmental damage while equating the human population and life at large to geological, agricultural, and other forms of matter with usable material capacities.
Throughout the two weeks, participants will share their existing work as well as work-in-progress research with the aim to contribute to a laboratory of practises and ideas through fieldwork, screenings, lectures and discussions. During the residency, a shared vocabulary and bibliography will be developed to support the production of situated knowledge within these contexts.
The project is funded by the Lithuanian Council for Culture. ///
Teta Tsybulnyk is an artist, visual anthropologist and aspiring psychoanalyst based in Kyiv, Ukraine. Her research spans from the non-human gaze on nature to semiotics of the unconscious and dreams. She is the co-founder of ruїns collective, an art group currently consisting of herself and Elias Parvulesco. They co-authored a number of video works including dendro dreams (2017), zong (2019), K-Object from LL-Group (2019), and Salty Oscillations (2021).The films were screened at international film festivals (FIDMarseille, Glasgow Short Film Festival, Docudays UA) and art exhibitions (MAXXI National Museum in Rome, Royal Art & History Museum in Brussels, Art Centre Silkeborg Bad). Oleksandr Teliuk (also known by a moniker Elias Parvulesco) is a film scholar, artist and curator. As a film archivist and programmer he works at the Dovzhenko Center, Ukrainian state film archive. As an artist and director he took part in a number of film festivals (the most recent of them are FIDMarseille; Oberhausen; Glasgow and others), and exhibitions ('Unfolding Landscapes', Silkeborg; 'antiwarcoalition.art', online, Kyiv; 'Chain Reaction', Rome, Bratislava; 'To Watch the War', Wintertour; 'Heart of Earth', Kyiv). He was a nominee of the PinchukArtCentre Prize 2020. He also a co-founder of ruїns collective Kyiv-based film and art union that aimed to reflect on the complex world of today and develop appropriate ethical paradigms.
Ilona Jurkonytė, Ph.D. is a film and media researcher and curator. Her background is in philosophy, communication studies, art theory, and film studies. She was a Vanier Scholar at Concordia University, Montreal (2015–2019). Her research interests span environmental media studies and transnational film studies. Her work critically examines frontier regimes in moving image production and circulation, as well as their geo- and hydro- political implications. She is particularly invested in decolonial methodologies in relation to these fields of inquiry. Her current research bridges nuclearity studies, ecosystemic thinking, and the little-known history of astrobotany (which emerged in Lithuania in the late 1970s and early 1980s). Her latest publication: “Bomb Archive: The Marshall Islands as Cold War Film Set” (2023).
Darya Tsymbalyuk grew up in Mykolaiv, Ukraine, and is currently based in the UK. She writes, researchers, and draws. Her work lies at the intersection of environmental humanities and artistic research, and is based on feminist and decolonial methodologies. Darya is a Max Hayward Visiting Fellow at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford (2022-2023). She has received her PhD in 2021 from the University of St Andrews, Scotland, and her dissertation was dedicated to human-plant relations in stories of displacement and war. Her articles and essays appeared in Nature, IWMpost, Open Democracy, Antennae: Journal of Nature in Visual Culture, NiCHE: Network in Canadian History & Environment, Arcadia: Environment & Society Portal, Springs: The Rachel Carson Center Review. She is also a co-author of an open-access book Limits of Collaboration: Arts, Ethics, and Donbas (Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung 2022). Together with Kateryna Voznytsia, Yulia Serdyukova, and Viktor “Corwic” Zasypkin, Darya is a co-author of a docufiction animation Displaced Garden. Based on Darya's PhD research, the film tells stories of humans and plants displaced from the east of Ukraine as a result of the Russian invasion of the region in 2014. Miruna Dunu is a Romanian spatial and information designer based in the Netherlands. With a background in architecture and information design, Miruna’s work centres around translating complex architectural narratives into comprehensible formats, such as exhibitions, product design, graphics, and moving image. Her award-winning short experimental docu-fiction Coastland was screened internationally at over 25 film festivals, while the research behind the film was exhibited in a solo exhibition at Proyector Gallery in Mexico City. Miruna works as Visual Communications Designer at the architectural practice studio MVRDV and is co-founder of the research-and-design duo KMworks.
Asia Bazdyrieva' research and practice spans visual culture and environmental humanities at large. Her projects focus on Soviet modernity and its ideological and material implications in spaces, bodies, and lands. She holds an MA in Art History from the City University of New York and an MS in Analytical Chemistry from the Kyiv National University. She was a Fulbright scholar in 2015–2017, an Edmund S. Muskie fellow (2017), and a Digital Earth Fellow (2018). Bazdyrieva co-authored ‘Geocinema’ — a collaborative project exploring the possibilities of a “planetary” notion of cinema. Concerned with the understanding and sensing of the earth while being on the ground, the project includes vastly distributed processes of image and meaning making. She is currently a resident at Transmediale (Berlin) and a Ph.D. candidate at MAKE/SENSE program between Critical Media Lab and University of Arts and Design Linz.
Egija Inzule is curator and director of NAC of Vilnius Academy of Arts based between Zurich and Nida. She is co-curator of the Neringa Forest Architecture Project and The Children’s Forest Pavilion at Biennale Architettura 2023, the Lithuanian Pavilion in Venice. She has worked as curator in the teams of castillo/corrales, Paris; Istituto Svizzero di Roma; and Shedhalle, Zurich and is currently a tutor at the Dutch Art Institute.
|