VISIONARY

From the very beginning, this project was a challenge for the creator due to lack of experience in working with archival photography, as well as because of her desire to keep the work free of political messages. The idea of the Maidan Square project arose during lectures and conversations about archives and memory, “rewritten history”, “sense of time”, “planned manipulation”, “post-truth” etc.

The Maidan, as a place of concentration of hopes and promises, is too complicated even for itself, since none of the memories and descriptions of it seems to be accurate. Similar feelings of inability to describe this place appeared after hours of viewing of archival photography and walks through Maidan nowadays, during which you drown in cuddles of mohair wolves and zebras.

 The inability to explain or analyze this led to the form of a silent witness, and it was the animal which was chosen to become such a constant witness (there are a lot of animal figures today at Maidan): the goat, as the first documented toponym of animal origin(this place was previously called a “Goat’s swamp”) and the animal, which crates an archetypically pair with a wolf, the documentation of which is used in the installation.

 The installation is made in form of the upper part of a goat costume, the head, that is fixed at the head level of the viewer.

The viewer can "get inside" the head and view the archives photos of Maidan, which is chaotically interspersed with the photos of the present Maidan. Due to stroboscopic lighting, the list of "memories" resembles a way of images appear in our imagination. The form and method of interaction with this form not only refers to the historically toponymic totem, but also to animators in costumes of animals that in some way embody these totems in a modern way. 

In this work, the materials of the Central State CinePhotoPhono Archives of Ukraine named after H. Pshenychnyi, archive of Valerii Miloserdov and Instagram account “romert3delnaja” have been used.

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