2009 – Cyland Video Archive

Andromeda – The Girl Who Smoked Soap

Darya Cherkashina — Tue, 06 Feb 2024 20:11:40 +0000

Andromeda is a performance film that plays with texts and iconography in a postmodern manner. A combination of texts written by author CarlosMagno Rodríguez and his co-authors Giselle Werneck, Lindbergh Fernandez, interspersed with quotes from Lucien Ducasse’s Isidora (Fragments from the Songs of Maldoror) combined with biblical quotations and lengthy discussions on pollution, etc. Read out by a character with a megaphone, they are no longer outrageous, transgressive or liberating, just twisted literature of enchantment, with no morals. The characters pose for an iconographic composition close to the Christian and Renaissance traditions, a kind of imagined “Last Supper”.

Andromeda is a cinematographic reality, created for questioning disparate, paradoxical iconographic models, criticizing modern society as if numb and frozen in front of the All-Seeing Eye-the camera’s eye. This also applies to music, such as the accordion music “Kanonen’s Song” and “The Ballad of a Soldier’s Wife” by Kurt Keil (co-author of Bertolt Brecht).

ANDROMEDA – THE GIRL WHO SMOKED SOAP 02

ANDROMEDA – THE GIRL WHO SMOKED SOAP01

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Horizon Line

Darya Cherkashina — Tue, 21 Nov 2023 15:42:27 +0000

Horizon Line is one of the key video installations by Alexander Terebenin.
The work is based on numerous photographs capturing the walls of buildings in St. Petersburg. Traces of paint, plaster, and rust on peeling surfaces form dramatic landscapes — devoid of houses, trees, or people, these are empty and featureless places, resembling the earth in the first or last days of creation.

Horizon Line was shown at the Cyberfest-7 (2013) in Berlin, at the space of The WYE.

terebenin – horizont 4

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terebenin – horizont 1

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The Unknown Technician

Darya Cherkashina — Wed, 21 Jul 2021 17:56:14 +0000

loop

Experimental film by an unknown movie technician. Edited film footage, the 1960s. Found and restored by the artist.

Elagin – The Unknown Technician 1

Elagin – The Unknown Technician 2

Elagin – The Unknown Technician 3

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Cherries talk

Darya Cherkashina — Wed, 09 Dec 2020 17:34:56 +0000

Hallucination of a landscape. Dizzy modulation. Endless metamorphosis. One scene is slipping into another. Spectator position is counterpointed and given to non-human. Sense is eaten, swallowed, lost. We are in a spiral of its own logic.

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Purification by snow

Darya Cherkashina — Wed, 09 Dec 2020 17:19:53 +0000

The artist watches a woman in her hometown in Siberia cleaning a carpet with snow. Veronica remembers that, when she was a child, this event seemed like a celebration or a game to her when something private, in this case a carpet, that could be found in any regular Soviet interior, was suddenly placed on … Continue reading "Purification by snow"

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The Secret

Darya Cherkashina — Wed, 02 Dec 2020 17:50:46 +0000

The video is a brief novella with an introduction, culmination, and finale.The first part (the credits) are dark shots, the sound of steps. The second (main) part — “stepping” shots of the landscape, and the sound of a radio transmission of secret codes is mixed in with the sound of steps. The third part has shots of a city at night, and silence.

Given the rather aggressive soundtrack of the first two parts, the third is perceived as a certain kind of silence.

This main (second) part of the video is a performance, throughout which the artist walks down the city streets and films everything he passes.

The semantic structure of the performance is based on the following.

The walking person makes three movements at once: forward, up, and down. He usually does not notice the rhythmic motions up and down. He does not concentrate on the natural, routine processes that occur in his body and with his body during the process of walking; it is a reflex.

While walking, the legs make pendulum-like movements in relation to the walker’s vertical axis.

The most complex movement is that of the feet, which, besides simple movement forward and upward/downward also change their angle relative to the axis of the knee.

The rhythm of all mentioned movements is the same, and comparable with heartbeats, inhalation/exhalation, and the rhythm of a march.

If the video camera is affixed to the upper surface of the foot (i.e., the foot is used as the top of a tripod), then the “eye” of the camera will make pendulous motions in the rhythm of walking, and thus record all the objects on its path.

As a result, everything that the viewer sees on the screen is a trace of this performance.

Valeriy Ayzenberg

Program ESCAPE the secret1

Program ESCAPE the secret2

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Thirst and Crystals

Darya Cherkashina — Wed, 28 Oct 2020 19:32:40 +0000

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Name of Russia

Darya Cherkashina — Wed, 21 Oct 2020 18:02:24 +0000

Tovarishchestvo Novie Tupie – Name of Russia (TV)3

Tovarishchestvo Novie Tupie – Name of Russia (TV)2

Tovarishchestvo Novie Tupie – Name of Russia (TV)1

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KALAMEES Part 1

Darya Cherkashina — Fri, 01 May 2020 11:55:13 +0000

Camera and editing: Eléonore de Montesquiou
Original music: Tatjana Kozlova
with Sasha Kaliadine and Nastia Kaliadina

This film was made on the lake Peipsi which marks the border between Russian and Estonia.

Sasha is a fisherman. In the winter, he goes out with others for one day, on the frozen lakes and rivers. Each of them makes a hole in the ice and stays sometimes all day long, in the cold, waiting for the fish. It is both a common passion the fishermen share, leaving together for the daily adventure, and a very solitary one, they all sit apart from each other and hardly communicate.

Sasha grew up in Ivangorod, his parents were given an apartment in the highest building of the city, overlooking the river, the bridge, in a word the border. Now Sasha is in his late twenties, he works in Kreenholm’s fabric, in Narva –Estonia- he walks the Russian-Estonian border daily, he goes out at night in Saint Petersburg and doesn’t speak a word of Estonian

My film is a portrait of Sasha, of his silent fishing, how he is organised to resist the cold. Through this individual portrait, his words raise the issue of Ivangorod’s particular situation: what does it mean to live right on a border?

Eleonore de Montesquiou KALAMEES1

Eleonore de Montesquiou KALAMEES2

Eleonore de Montesquiou KALAMEES3

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NAINE

Darya Cherkashina — Thu, 30 Apr 2020 11:00:12 +0000

Olga is in her fifties. She has both Estonian and Russian passports, she speaks only Russian. She was born in Narva (now Estonia) and lives in Ivangorod (now Russia), two cities facing each other on either side of the river. Olga speaks about herself as a woman of Perestroika. In this film she talks about going through these times with two children. She raises the issue of living on the very edge of Europe and tells about her relationship to work then and today. Olga used to work in a factory that closed in the mid-eighties. More than a personal portrait, in this film, her voice speaks for numerous women of her generation, living in between the former Eastern-Soviet States and Russia, imagining day to day solutions to survive in this precarious and constantly changing status.

I filmed Olga and her friend, another Olga, bathing in the border river Narva. Their bodies reflect the strength that they have needed till now. These images are b&w in order to link them to the archive images.

Sound: monolog by Olga, a woman with both Russian and Estonian passports, making a living by crossing the border daily. Olga was born in the fifties in the Soviet city of Narva-Ivangorod now split between Estonia and Russia.

Music: composed by Tanja Kozlova (Estonian contemporary composer, who was born on the Russian side of the border and lives now in Tallinn)

naine2009montesquiou1

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