An area of some importance
Developed during Digital artist residency and OffsiteProject google maps residency, in this project I explore my family's journey and settlement in southern Siberia and Kazakhstan in the 1947-1960s during the space race. It's a mapping exploration shaped by the USSR violent regime, through a family archive with a humanity's first journey into space as a background.
1948-1956 my grandparents had spent 8 years in a Stalinist camp. After Stalin's death, without an option to legally settle back in western Ukraine, they were given a single option to work and live in southern and later northern Kazakhstan directly taking part in the colonial terraforming projects of the USSR, without other options.
1957: the year my family moved from a Siberian labour camp to populate the “virgin territories” in Kazakhstan.
1957: the year Sputnik was launched, starting the space race.
Using mapping as a processual tool for investigation, I will explore unmarked settlements in Siberia and the time when “Quarter 17” (the labour camp where my family were situated) became a village named “Sosnovka”, or “pine tree”. On Google Maps this region is mapped at a much lower resolution than its neighbouring areas. I wonder whether this blurriness implies that the location is deemed of little importance by the authorities; or that it is, in fact, an area of sensitivity, hence the need to censor it.
Through a family image archive, Google Maps (as a parallel between Sputnik launch from Baykonur in 1957), and oral history, I am exploring their experiences in those areas, considering the top-secret space race as a backdrop. Their knowledge consisted of a disjointed combination of rumours, speculation, and occasional sightings of machinery being transported to the site. It is possible that they directly contributed their labour to the infrastructure creation leading to the rocket tests at Baikonur Cosmodrome.
Following the map to Kazakhstan, I will intertwine my family research with other significant political events occurring in Kazakhstan at that time; namely the creation of Baikonur Cosmodrome (the USSR’s space launch facility) and its infrastructure, and nuclear bomb tests in eastern Kazakhstan.
My research will juxtapose the nomadic state of my family and their search of a new life in Kazakhstan with the space race (the ultimate human journey into unknown territories) and space exploration as an imposed unifying ambition for the USSR’s citizens.
Visually I am trying to understand, depict, imagine the fragments of information that my family had at the time about the grand and very secret projects of the USSR. Their knowledge, I've been told consisted of a disjointed combination of rumours, wild guesswork and speculation, even though they might have directly contributed with their labour to the infrastructure creation leading to the nuclear test sites or Baikonur Cosmodrome.
Lis. Timber (2019)
Digital print or physical print on transparent acrylic 0.8mm acrylic sheet.
Neighbouring sites (2019)
Digital print or physical print on transparent acrylic 0.8mm acrylic sheet.
People were here. Antropo(s)cenic sites as comfort. (2019)
Digital print or physical print on transparent acrylic 0.8mm acrylic sheet.
Distance - nature - barriers (2019)
Digital print or physical print on transparent acrylic 0.8mm acrylic sheet.
Baykonur, Baikonyr, Baykonyr (2019)
Digital print or physical print on transparent acrylic 0.8mm acrylic sheet.