a darker, better place

Abstract

a darker, better place is a visual project (video and photography) that I created during an artist residence at the Centre for Urban History (Lviv, Ukraine, 2019) with a grant from the British Council.
The work is the outcome of research into the CUH archives, namely TV reels from the 1960s, and comprises a video installation in addition to still images retrieved from the reels. The assembled material portrays a semi-fictional community that, sometime in the 1960s, somewhere in Ukraine, turned their backs on the perils of a world on the brink of disaster. They decided to build a place of their own, secreted away from the Cold War and Space Race rhetoric. They aimed to voyage to the centre of the earth, reaching for a darker, better place.
The images retrieved are overlayered stills, unintentional and fleeting passages between two different shots that gather as a single composite image for one 24th of a second. The words accompanying the piece seek to reflect on the following questions: How can appropriation and intervention on archival footage, within the realm of artistic practice, retrieve content from its original purpose and, in so doing, generate new readings?
Secondly, to what extent do these interventions on archival material bridge between the past and the present?
These questions will be addressed in articulation with the work of authors such as Joan Fontcuberta (on the realms of real and fiction), Marianne Hirsch (on the distinctions between history and memory), and Ariella Aïsha Azoulay (on the possibilities inscribed within archives).