Uliana Bychenkova
“The Remembrance of Air” Length 4' 50", fixed media, stereo, 2022
The study was assembled from the sounds of my everyday Weimar life: the space of a building where I live and an area on my way to the grocery store. While working on the collected material, I wanted to indicate the difference between air and underwater environments, and to express such transition processes as diving and surfacing, through different approaches to stereo gestures and speed. Of course, these symbols refer only to the imaginary spaces of human perception, not real physics. The title of the study refers to the work of the feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray “The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger”, which criticizes the tradition of Western metaphysics. Sound as well as Air is an important object of New Materialism, an intellectual space of inclusive sensitivity to the weightless and invisible tissues.
Outline Ritornello “Velyki Selmentsi”
Length 13' 38", Sound Essay, 2023
I had a peculiar listening situation on my way from Ukraine to Germany at the end of February 2022. It took place somewhere on the Carpathian mountain’s serpentine road when we tried to get to the border on a minibus of Polish activists. It was already night when we got closer to the borderline but then our driver realised that we got lost. We tried to search for other border points and the driver was in touch with his Polish colleague by phone. I was sitting near and listening to this sound situation in the middle of the night on a serpentine snow road: the driver tried to spell in the right way the name of the next border point using Polish names to transcribe the Ukrainian toponym “Velyki Selmentsi”.
There is something performative in the process of producing a sound essay — a memory lived through bodily effort and bodily inventiveness to express a thought. Observing my own inability to grasp the form of piece, I suddenly came to the conclusion that the elusive contour is its compositional character. However, the very act of groping, of feeling one's perceptual memory, of returning, which refines the contour as much as it loses it, is in itself a rotation, a ritornello of drilling at certain distant point. Dealing with memory, trying to comprehend its aesthetic formula, remembering details that can’t help to build a smooth monolithic monument. Each subsequent memory is a variation of the strokes, hazy, inaccurate and blurred in space. The serpentine shape, which I mysteriously was aspired to, seemed to me the embodiment of lightness — I was imagining a halo of smoke rising up in a spiral, where names like stars under a dome become exact coordinates. But nothing is certain in smoke. Navigation in the space is dramatically unstructured, and some random abstract data can become a coordinate cipher.
Silence féminin
Essay, 2021Read ︎︎︎
“Study for incredibly smart dark kittens”
Length
4' 08", fixed media, stereo, 2023
At this point, I would like to send some greetings to Enola Holmes, Mica Levi, and the indestructible power of horror, which milk foam perfectly possesses!
