INGEL VAIKLA & ALICJA MELZACKA CONSTELLATIONS
Writer and curator Alicja Melzacka plunges into a kaleidoscope of constellations that uncover overlapping pasts, presents, and futures. By relying on Estonian-born, Belgium-based artist Ingel Vaikla’s work Shapes and Distances (2020), these constellations are to be read as intersections between various temporal realms, between archival footage, film, politics, and architecture, as well as between failed utopia, short-lived realities, and unrealised futures.
*This text first appeared in Kajet Issue 05
Between the ochre tower blocks of the Kyiv quarter, a group of boys is performing what could be a parkour routine. Agile fingers wrapped around the bar, feet sensing the kerb underneath them before taking the decisive step. The playground is not their usual training ground, but they are quick to adapt to any conditions. Climbing, lifting, and jumping, they seem to be testing the limits of their bodies, but even more so of the space and the existing infrastructure.
Since the 1980s, parkour has evolved from a military obstacle-course training to an unrestrained way of traversing the city. Enabling alternative navigation through urban spaces, it can be considered a practice of dissent. Parkour being the sport of choice for the youth of Slavutych lends itself to a pretty conspicuous, but nevertheless apt, metaphorical reading, only reinforced by the contrast with the archival footage of children parading through the same streets just over 30 years ago. These boys are the new generation with entirely different prospects and expectations than their parents, for whom Slavutych was the promised land. They wear international brands, use the latest devices, and even though at face value not much has changed besides their appearance, in fact everything is different. Slavutych, known as ‘the last atomic city’, was built at a record pace to accommodate the personnel of the Chernobyl nuclear plant and other citizens of Pripyat, evacuated following the meltdown. While the entire apparatus of the Soviet Union was jarring and grinding to a halt, this young city seemed to have only started to accelerate. But the perspectives have changed with the gradual decommissioning of the power plant. Today, Slavutych is undergoing a difficult transformation and it is uncertain whether it can become a place to accommodate its young citizens’ futures.
And honestly, we’ll see the past repeat itself until the end…
The verses of Killstation—an up-and-coming rapper from California—follow the boys as they delve deeper into the district.
I’m meant to be the one to fix the cycle, spinning till I’m dead…
I know I won’t be here for very long, I’m hanging by a thread.
The way in which the boys reclaim the space and put the existing structures to another use reminds me of my own childhood games. I remember the trzepak just outside of my school, an outdoor carpet-beating frame I used to play on. My mother was always concerned about it. Keep your feet on the ground, she would say, and sometimes she still does, albeit in a different sense. The moment the school bell rang, we would all race to get the best spot—the more fearless kids at the top bar, the rest in the middle or below. Some would converse hanging upside down, while others would attach a rubber band to one of the metal legs and play skipping. It was our first social gathering space outside of school before we were old enough to go to parties or even visit each others’ houses. Not that we lacked actual places to play; like in Slavutych, every housing estate in my city was equipped with a playground, and in the early 2000s, new outdoor gyms and football fields started springing up like mushrooms. But the trzepak had this irresistible charm, probably because of the fact that it wasn’t originally meant as a place for us to play.
Nineteen-eighty-six came lingering, and with it, a tragedy no-one could imagine; gazing beyond the horizon had made people shortsighted. Today, two roughly-hewn stone arms grow out of the granite base outside Unit Four. In a grateful or perhaps generous gesture, the hands enshrine and elevate a miniature sarcophagus, under which the melted reactor is buried. The monument is devoted to the builders of the confinement and other ‘liquidators’ who risked their lives—often unaware of the real danger—to secure the site in the years following the meltdown. Amongst them was Nikolai Titenok, a firefighter who died two weeks after receiving a lethal dose of radiation. It is said that the severe internal burns he sustained had blistered his heart.
When researching the Kyiv archives, Ingel came across footage of an old television programme on cardiology. Amongst the other shots, the image of a sculpted hand wielding a heart was so singular that she felt an impulse to incorporate it in her film. Perhaps it reminded her remotely of the monument. She told me later she had not heard of Titenok’s scarred heart before. It’s amazing how choices made based on a ‘feeling’ can find ground in reality, she said.
What we share with Ingel is an interest in architecture as a juncture of poetics and politics, a prism focusing and splitting memories and ideologies. In Shapes and Distances, the architecture seems to be de-monumentalised and de-spectacularised. Depicted from a close-vantage point and at times filling the entire frame, the potentially intimidating and distant urban landscape is rendered warm and intimate. The film counters the increasingly popular mode of depicting the post-Soviet cities (so-called ‘ruin porn’). Rather than titillating the viewer with the carefully curated images of dilapidated buildings or brutalist monuments, Ingel chose a less-sensational setting: a playground.
Shooting in Slavutych must have felt almost surreal since the city itself resembles a film set. From above, it appears as an island lost in a sea of green. From below, it offers an unparalleled experience of being in several places at once. From the pink volcanic stone covering the facades in the Yerevan quarter to the characteristic tiles found in Tbilisi, each district was built using materials, methods, and sometimes even labour, from one of the Soviet republics involved in this monumental project.
Slavutych, the city-synecdoche, embodies the productive tension between the universal and the particular, between architectural uniformity, characteristic of socialist modernism, and the diversity of ‘regional styles’. With their quirky details and idiosyncratic palette, the estates of Slavutych represent on the one hand a nod back towards the architecture ‘national in form and socialist in content’ and, on the other hand, a glimpse forward towards postmodern regionalism. Not old enough to be recognised as heritage but not entirely contemporary either, the city dwells in the interval between the past and the present.
The purported objectivity of documentary filmmaking—much like a wishful neutrality of the exhibition space—is nothing more than a set of conventions which keep passivising its protagonists and its viewers. Oscillating between documentary and fiction, Ingel is well aware of the pitfalls of one or the other. She takes time to get to know and inhabit the space she works with, and this sensibility results in powerful images combining criticality with a great dose of intimacy.
Trinh Minh-Ha writes that truth and meaning in filmmaking are likely to be equated with one another. Yet, what is put forth as truth is often nothing more than a meaning. And what persists between the meaning of something and its truth is the interval, a break without which meaning would be fixed and truth congealed. This break is what Ingel investigates through her films. She always starts with an existing place, especially one with a complex, contested history, which she then filters through her personal experience. This radical subjectivity is visible in Ingel’s directing and editing choices, which indirectly tell about the filmmaker’s doubts: her struggle with the question of the representation of Eastern Europe and with her own authority in the process of meaning production. The manner in which Ingel portrays her protagonists is far from other-ing strategies deployed by some ethnographic documentaries. The boys she filmed are resourceful, energetic, and self-confident. They feel comfortable in front of the lens because they are already self-mediated; at some point, we see them filming each other and clearly posing for the camera.
The filmmaker herself is no longer an entity ‘on the other side’ but a physical body thrown into the filmed world. From the bottomless reservoir of archival images, Ingel selected, amongst others, an image capturing the shadow of the cameraperson, superimposed over the landscape. In another place, we can hear the camera operator running out of breath, as she follows one of the boys to the roof, and just when we think we are going to enjoy a panoramic view of Slavutych, the scene cuts.
The material shot in Slavutych, much like Ingel’s former project Roosenberg, is characterised by an open structure; it can be reconfigured and rearranged creating new constellations, opening up to many possible readings (something I hope this text does as well). This reconfiguration occurs not only in the process of editing and curating, but also while moving around and shifting the gaze between multiple-screen projections.
After Walter Benjamin, constellations can be seen as instances of pasts and presents connecting. He believed that particular moments, objects, and texts could be blasted out of the continuum of historical succession and brought together to create meaningful constellations. This kind of superimposition of different temporal orders is achieved through Ingel’s perceptive use of both archival and newly-generated material, but it also permeates the general atmosphere in Slavutych, the city where the present and past remain entangled.
When working on this text, it took me a long time to find my voice and overcome my obsessive reference-mania, at least partially. As I am typing these words, I have about 60 open tabs with texts on nostalgia, memory, and identity by the pioneers of exile writing. Benjamin, Borges, Boym, Kundera, Ugrešić… I cannot part with the doubt shadowing me. Am I trying so hard to speak in the words of others to push away the responsibility, or seek validation for my own thoughts? And how could I ever relate our experiences, so distant in time and circumstances?
A generation born at the time of transition, the time of tentative possibilities and compensation for the chances lost by our parents. Tethering on the threshold of two worlds: the one perceptible to us and the other that no longer is, known only through the memories inherited from those close to us. Our identities often feel plural too; no longer exiles but expats, we live in more than one place. For some time now, I have been leaving home to go back home.
I have never been to Slavutych. Yet, I feel as if I had. Its virtual streets I travelled up and down in Google Maps felt distinctive but familiar. I recognised in them some places from my past. You can feel nostalgia for places you have never visited or times you haven’t lived through. But working in such a context, you have to tread lightly. Any deviation from the established codes of ‘objective’ filmmaking can be seen as romanticisation. And today, nostalgia is a forbidden word. It is considered mushy and treacherous. But it hasn’t always been that way.
It was only with the advent of modernity that nostalgia started to be thought of as the opposite of progress, a reactionary answer to the rapidly changing perception of time. No wonder then that today, when the new technologies affect the very way we experience time, a new wave of nostalgia is welling up. Nobody can deny that nostalgia can and is being used as a very effective tool of political and cultural manipulation, masquerading old sentiments as new urgencies. But nostalgia has more than one face and need not be regressive; on the contrary, it allows us to assume some distance from our own time, to look away so that when we refocus, we might be able to hold our gaze firmly on it. It is exactly this ‘disjunction and anachronism’ which Agamben believes makes us contemporary: those who coincide too well with the epoch, who are perfectly tied to it in every respect, are not contemporaries, precisely because they do not manage to see it.
In times when the memory of socialism has been, as Franco Berardi once said, criminalised and the image of Eastern Europe instrumentalised as living proof of no alternative to the neoliberal world order, it seems that all utopian narratives have been discredited. All but one. But the capitalist utopia is crumbling too. The realisation that everything was forever until it was no more can be devastating, but it can also be liberating. And as we try to settle accounts with modernity, reflective nostalgia can help us identify the ways of being-together that we are lacking today.
When one utopia collides with another, it feels like tectonic plates crashing. The intervals between those collisions are irregular and unpredictable. The last perceivable crash took place between 1989 and 1991 and pushed the limits of the thinkable.
I believe failed utopias affect us all equally strongly not because we miss their short-lived realities but because we miss the unrealised futures. Because we see in them the reflection of all past unrealised futures and those yet to come. We want to retrieve the belief in the future anterior and be able to say: in 30 years from now, I will have been… What we share is not so much a nostalgia for the past as a nostalgia for a better future that we think we have already lost.