The Past Ripens in the Future

2022
Performance, four-channel sound system, environment, former military base. Duration: infinity. Performers: Asya Ashman, Marta Ruszkowska, Therese Bendjus, Polina Fenko, Ekaterina Volkova, Hana Stojakovic
Commissioned by Museion Foundation for Transart Festival

The Past Ripens In The Future highlights the history of the failed resistance in the planetary-political dimension, algorithmic governance, and the politics of affect used by an autocratic regime. This process is based on recursion, repetition with alterity, and slow time as a part of moderation of the affects of oppression and control by techno-social governance. In this context, the autocracy incorporated in the worldwide logistics structure could be a force that could constitute the political weather and climate of oppression.

The history of colonialism and oppression in Russia is also the story of the revolutionary movement. The work is based on the practice of knock-communication of political prisoners in solitary cells in the 19th century. One of the important revolutionaries Vera Figner said “The first step for prisoners is a struggle for the knock” in the other words struggle for communication and solidarity. Then if your resistance is failed you can find yourself in solitary confinement but also you can find yourself in a solitary cell built by the algorithms. The title of the work is a deconstructed line from the Poem Without a Hero by Anna Akhmatova. Now any version of the future makes a new version of the past. One of the ways to reroute failed resistance is through repetition with alterity and temporality.

The choreographic pattern is based on the connection with circulation, and gravity and will be augmented by accompanying sound. The imaginary and sound of the work is poetic assemblages of fallen, left behind litter and leftovers, and metabolized matter from the media and cultural fields related to the history of the revolutionary movement since the 19th till 23th century. The poetry on site is inspired by the poetry of Vera Figner. The sound environment of recorded insects was inspired by dozens of diaries of revolutionaries in which they described a sound of knock-communication in prison as the sounds of timber-worms, or the sound of anonymous intellect from the walls. The site for performance is a former military base and this ruin of the cold war plays differently at sunrise of new geopolitical struggle after February 24, 2022.