Anna Sopova
site-specific project,
installation, archival documents, four-channel sound installation, text, found object
2020
"one of the most ancient functions of an image
is replacement function
formed in the world of
emptiness "
Building a constellation between the archives of secret records of the state security of the USSR, recorded on eavesdropping devices, "noise" and an observer, the authors of the project raise the question of the problem of the document of its connection with the event and "political speech", where the event acts as an original, and its documentation as a translation ... The problem of translation in relation to the origin of an "event" is often compared with a delay, which prevents one from approaching the "original" itself, and is compared with the question of the "untranslatable" of an event or the limit of communicability. The translation is problematized where the language is no longer perceived as transparent and where nothing else is at stake but a displacement mechanism, or shift. Language appears as a creative transformation, meeting, event. In other words, translation is what allows you to turn communication into an object of theoretical consideration, revealing its historical opacity.
«…at this time the Listener always felt
yourself especially lonely.
In deep midnight silence
the surrounding space was in front
of him in everything
its boundless gloomy
desolation.»
The history of the town of writers Peredelkino has many testimonies of listening devices that existed in their houses, placed by the Soviet state security agencies. There are records made on devices of this kind, as well as transcripts of testimonies maintaining contact with law enforcement agencies. Following the study of archival data, an artistic character "Listener" appears in the project, whose story refers to the novel by Chinese writer Liú Cíxīn "The Problem of the Three Bodies", where a similar hero is also encountered, whose life role consisted only of endless listening to the noise of the universe. Here the character of the listener is a bird's nest found, whose story, following the method of defamiliarization * of the thing according to Shklovsky, narrates about the noise he heard.
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* Shklovsky contrasted the method of defamiliarisation with the positivist "model of saving attention" that existed at that time, which reduced "seeing" to "recognition" as an accelerated process of cognition. For him, the “method of defamiliarisation” of writing or an image became a weapon in the struggle against automatism and a return to “experience” as the main form of immediate, initial perception.
with Antanas Yatcinevichus https://www.facebook.com/antanas.yatcinevichus