RMIT Design Hub Gallery 7 March–9 May, 2020
Eurasia (Questions on Happiness), 2018 digital film, 4k, 64 min., colour, sound, video wall hand-tufted carpet, wool
Arrows I jacquard weaving, lurex, various sizes embroidery on plastic bags, various sizes
Once uttered, untrue, 2020 Logo for a forgotten NGO, 2020 (as found) Nebylitsa, 2020 Frozen songs, 2020 Seen, 2020 Painting Trees, 2020 Looking forward, 2020 Inhabitant, 2020 Hopes all things, 2020 Neomedievalists, 2020 Along these singing lines, 2020 (after Marina Tsvetaeva) A bubble, 2020
Those who wait, 2020 Waves! Dear ones!, 2020 Speak no word, 2020 (after Fyodor Tyutchev) From lines—to poles, 2020 (after Marina Tsvetaeva) Jacket padding, 2020 Irony, 2020 Clock, 2020 Forest and interface, 2020 Holistic, 2020 Playhead, 2020 Swiss army knife, 2020 Silver rain, 2020
Arrows II jacquard weaving, wool, lurex
We, versions, and waves, 2020 DVD Zone 5, 2020
Arrows III jacquard weaving, lurex, various sizes
Arrows III, 2020 (closed captions)
METAHAVEN’S VAST BODY OF WORK ACROSS ART, DESIGN AND FILM speculates on what the shifting status of truth might mean emotionally, technologically and geo-politically, and asks who and what enables this condition. Since 2007, the Amsterdam-based collective has unbraided, examined, and worked on the borders between information, fantasy, fiction, and noise.
Design Hub Gallery presents their exhibition Field Report at a time of unprecedented public concern about the construction of truth in politics and the media.
In Australia, we have witnessed a renewed blurring of the boundaries between truth and fiction, with several recent controversies demonstrating how quickly disinformation can spread: public deception around the Australian Government’s sports grants spending; documented inaccuracies in the reporting of the cause of the summer bushfires and their connection to the global climate emergency; and the unfounded controversy surrounding author Bruce Pascoe’s book Dark Emu and its version of Australian history. These events are all markers on a timeline of increasing public concern for the value of the truth on the public record.
Field Report draws on the idea of sampling, observation and analysis that the journalistic term ‘reporting from the field’ implies. It brings together multi-disciplinary collaborations, deep research, layered experiences of time (cinema, poetry, digital design, music, folktales) with speculative futures.
WE LIVE IN AN INCREASINGLY PERPLEXING ERA
It’s not always easy to differentiate reality and fiction, or reality and memes from the social media account Humans of Late Capitalism. It’s not always easy to tell online from offline, human mind from AI, and truth from a political agenda. The technology-powered plurality of voices has brought on both liberation and confusion. As writer Joan Didion once pointed out, ‘We tell ourselves stories in order to live, but what happens when stories take on a life of their own?’ Or when stories as we used to know them, with reliable narrators and happy endings—just stop working?
Metahaven explore the complexity of the contemporary condition; through their multifaceted work they take on geography, history, digital environment, and the challenges of being human in the brutal, weird and wonderful modernity.
Metahaven’s film Eurasia (Questions on Happiness), 2018, is an ambitious tableau pulled together from fragments of news, documentaries and YouTube videos combined with overwhelmingly picturesque footage from landscapes on the brink of Europe and Asia. Their film Hometown, 2018, is a two-screen poetic journey through Kyiv and Beirut shown through the eyes and voices of its natives. Information Skies, 2016, portrays forested hinterlands populated by avatar-like actors narrating the story of a fragile human connection.
But as it often happens with Metahaven’s work, the whole is much bigger than the sum of its parts. The collective explains:
We make films, which are often combinations of cinematic footage and animation. The films have protagonists, but no clear progress. Our films explore the relationship between fiction and truth, longing and fantasy.
Sinking into the soft tufted carpet which is an integral part of the installation, you find yourself sucked into a world which seems strange and different like science fiction, yet more relatable and real than any documentary.
We travel through a range of geographies, real and imagined, but a lot of them belong to the area of the post-communist influence or the New East. The connection comes through on many levels: Russian landscapes and classic Russian poetry, citing the Macedonian political context, and collaborative work with the new generation of creatives from Ukraine. Metahaven’s practice quite often exposes the tension between surface and depth.
In the publication PSYOP, 2018, which accompanied exhibitions at ICA, London and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, I had a chance to talk to them about the surface—the so-called post-Soviet aesthetics. In this interview, we talked more about depth, which is a continuous interest in the region which, for Metahaven, spans decades.
ANASTASIIA FEDOROVA
You quite often turn to countries which are postSoviet or of a former communist influence — Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Macedonia, to name a few. What is behind your interest in the area?
METAHAVEN
We have been interested in the Soviet and post-Soviet geography for a while. The so-called frozen conflict areas, quasi-states that appeared between the breakup of the Soviet Union and the emergence of contemporary Russia, to us always had a special significance as a sort of forebearers of what was to come: the exception becoming the rule. In our book Uncorporate Identity, 2010, we created an investigation around Transnistria, and other such spaces of exception. Our interest in these places was also visual. These places harboured combinations of quasi-free market aesthetics and Soviet insignia, giving shape and form to a kind of illicit fluidity in-between a living past, and an adaptive shapeshifting with the present. In 2010, we carried out a research project in Moscow, Fantastical Investments. In the following years, our interest only intensified and became interlocked with our personal lives. Reading Tolstoy’s 1897 essay What Is Art? was eye-opening on many levels, and some paragraphs from this work found their way into our first film, The Sprawl (Propaganda about Propaganda) in 2015. Around the same time, relationships between the West and Russia escalated on political terms.
AF
Do you think there is something about the postcommunist countries which is symptomatic for the current state of the world, and for what’s happening to our ideas of history and truth?
MH
In some parts of eastern Europe, reality appears less clearly unified on the same temporal axis. The historical accident that we collectively inhabit is, somehow, made visible. Our preoccupied cognition is looking for an intimacy with reality, and in a way, past and future constantly collide by the coexistence of hi-tech and medievalism. But more important than any objective description is the personal rendering of the inhabitant, or resident. So, it is absolutely not about the simple depiction of eastern Europe or Russia as a sci-fi dystopia, or repository of nascent fascinations. Quite on the contrary, there is a deep connection to, and a belief in, interiority. There is a belief in what isn’t visible.
AF
In Eurasia (Questions on Happiness), 2018, I was absolutely fascinated by the place which is the border between Europe and Asia in the Russian Urals. Could you tell me a bit about your decision to film there and what was the place like?
MH
The scene at the Asia and Europe monument on the highway between Ekaterinburg and Chelyabinsk is the first one we filmed at the start of our film shoot and road trip, which was overall a life-changing experience. It was important to us to start the shoot at the monument, on what has been decided to be the ‘border’ between the European and Asian continents. This is not a natural border like a river or a mountain range—the monument is the marker of a decision. There are tourists taking photos, one foot in Asia, the other in Europe.
AF
What other significant places from the area appear in the film?
MH
We went down, via Kyshtym, to the basin of the SakElga river near the copper plant at Karabash—a place where the entire landscape has become copper-colored, including
PRESENTED ON A 16-SCREEN VIDEO WALL, Eurasia (Questions on Happiness) combines cinematic sequences, found footage, animation, and graphics with a soundtrack by electronic musician Kuedo. Through its different visual, aural, textual and material textures, the work moves between the distinctive temporality of a YouTube viral video, a poetic and folkish mode of science fictional storytelling, and moments where the film seems to arrive at a temporal standstill and overlaps with experience in real-time, thus breaking the hyped-up editing of its neighbouring sequences.
In the speculative narrative that underpins the film, the continent of Eurasia has assumed the name ‘DVD Zone 5’, with regional empires, breakaway states, and petty-nationalist republics engaged in fights over resources. The film riffs off Emile Durkheim’s 1914 essay ‘Variations of truth’ as well as a recent essay by Henry Kissinger about artificial intelligence.
The film’s evolving narrative is framed by three poems, ‘I know the truth’, 1915, by Marina Tsvetaeva; ‘Silentium!’, 1833, by Fyodor Tyutchev; and ‘Snow lies’, 1930, by Alexander Vvedensky. Each of these works, all read in voice-over, embodies a distinct position of the poet as a filter of reality. In the exhilarating ‘Snow lies’, the longest and final of the poems, Vvedensky denies language its pretence to convey any coherent meaning, running away with the listener’s imagination as well as with the concept of poetry itself.
In a passage of the film shot in Russia’s Ural district, a Blackmagic 4K digital camera mounted on a tripod is filmed at dusk, overlooking a steppe at the meeting point of Europe and Asia, accompanied by Durkheim’s treatise on truth, read in French. Bookending this eerily sublime vision are two pieces of found television footage: in one, the Russian Eurasianist philosopher Natella Speranskaya expounds on the eschatology of Lars von Trier; in the other, the Italian comedian-turned-populist politician Beppe Grillo cracks a joke in the European Parliament about Europe as a ‘mosaic’.
The continent of Eurasia, as both geographical and geopolitical concept, is a locus for the grand claims of projects of unification, and the hyper-fragmentation of an increasingly neo-medieval political order. Featuring a cinematic sequence in Veles, Macedonia, the infamous home of websites that circulated manufactured stories during the 2016 US election, the film hints at fake news being a man-made proxy for the indifference an artificial intelligence may feel toward the human condition.
In its combination of visual and communicative registers, Eurasia (Questions on Happiness) speaks to the manner in which political ideology and thought on the internet are inseparable from their encoding as specific forms of media production. Wrapping facts in fictions, and fictions in facts, the film renders an immersion in a material, temporal and emotional state of ‘epistemic uncertainty’, brought about by an ever more pervasive data-driven cognitive order.
the river itself, and there are these giant landscapes of slag and heavy metal pollution, produced by three centuries of copper mining without caring for anything. They’re an open portrait of what mankind has done. It takes a bit of work to process this beyond the idea of the ecological disaster, or a version of the Strugatsky brothers’ ‘Zone’ in its various versions. Naked, and very precise, the landscape has exactly no insects or other animals, and could equally be a script for a future version of the planet. We hid a keyboard in the slag.
AF
What was the rest of your road-trip like?
MH
After filming in Magnitogorsk, we went on to Yasnii and from there to Orsk, experiencing slowly descending standards of accommodation, but not of mood. Filming around Beloshapka, a place we discovered on Google Maps prior to the trip, the mood became ecstatic. Then, around Novotroitsk, we waited for a train on the New Silk Road, and finally one came, though it was going in the “wrong” direction; it was carrying cargo from Russia to Kazakhstan. The five-day shoot was concluded with dinner in a ‘Soviet Twin Peaks’ style hotel in Orsk and an ensuing disco event in one of the hotel rooms, during which a highly eclectic mix of music was played. What it was like to be in the Steppe? It was like experiencing pure, soft, heavenly nothingness, a space vast, tender, forgiving.
AF
What really captivated me is also the presence of the camera, both at the Eurasia point, and a few times in midst of breathtaking landscapes. The camera without a person operating it to me was like a disembodied gaze, the gaze without the viewer— which somehow also relates to how we consume information and imagery these days, particularly online. We’re constantly watching and looking—but we kind of dissolve in the process, we’re not there anymore. Have you ever thought of this or you had a completely different idea behind it?
MH
Your interpretation is close to our intention. We wanted to let the Blackmagic camera and the drone camera film each other. And to get rid of the operator, creating this, as you say, disembodied gaze, where it is the view itself, the vantage point itself, that becomes the focus. We disappear.
AF
The audience has a chance to watch Eurasia (Questions on Happiness) lying on the comfy and soft tufted carpet titled Infra Ultra. What was the idea behind it? I spent some time looking at the pattern and it reminded me of so many things—from some folk motives to, for some reason, graphics used for the Olympic Games.
MH
The installation aims to extend the film to the physical environment. As a combination of texture, geography, and interface, with the carpet we wanted to gesture towards a collective notion of viewing, where you
can use the viewing area almost as a public place. We hope viewers both feel comfortable watching the entire film or parts of it. Together or alone. We like folk motifs. We like Olympic Games graphics as well as Eurovision Song Contest visuals.
AF
One of the most distinguished parts of the work is your use of Russian poetry. What was your incentive behind using those? Was it connected to the nature of language and your experiments with storytelling?
MH
It is, for us, never a question of ‘using’. We loved the poems that are featured in Eurasia way before we included them in the film. So their presence is also not about reaching a certain effect, but simply about transmitting to others what they do to us.
AF
In Hometown, what was the specific reason to film it in Kyiv and Beirut? It’s interesting that locations there are partly invisible but also very recognisable. Considering you’re based in Western Europe (if I’m correct), was it important for you to explore the locations outside of the ‘West’? Your work is always very authentic and true to the place to me, but do you ever encounter the challenge of not looking at places with a ‘Western gaze’ ? How do you work with it?
MH
We try not to look ‘at’ but to look ‘in’. We are interested in the capacity of an image to express interiority. We can’t really judge whether that is anything to do with a ‘Western gaze’ or not. For example, in Hometown, Lera is throwing away an Eskimo ice cream wrapper, this is a Soviet ice cream which we initially knew from the Dutch translation of the epic children’s poem ‘The crocodile’, 191617 by Korney Chukovsky. They just happened to have these ice creams at the petrol station where we were shooting that morning, so there was no question of not including it. Poetry can transmit a sense of belonging about things you haven’t even seen, or tasted, before; you can have feelings about things that are not from your own culture.
Svetlana Boym’s essays about these types of feelings had an influence on us too, and made it easier to work with them. As you see, we are not influenced primarily by what we previously came to call ‘the New Easthetic’, this combination of derelict housing blocks, grey skies, and fashion. That aesthetic is just the surface.
As an example of our approach, the monologue of Lera near the end of Hometown, where she says:
Now in the sunken city, look around.
People dwell, lost, and entranced. They forgot about how children taught them what cannot be taught: a dawn of morality from within.
In this scene, Lera is walking along the windows of a market hall in Kyiv. The word ‘morality’ as we wrote it in English was translated to the Russian by Alexandra Anikina as ‘co-sensuality.’ The take that is used in the film is the very first one that we shot of that scene, and among the first ones we did on the first day of shooting of Hometown in general. But just to illustrate, at the very same time that we were shooting there was another crew shooting in the same location, and it was a fashion production. We bumped into
them regularly, and they into us. You can shoot at the same time, and the same place, and still see something completely different, because what you see is determined by what you want to see in something.
AF
I noticed that both for Hometown and Information Skies you worked with the designer Yulia Yefimtchuk—how did you come across her work and what do you like about it?
MH
We found Yulia Yefimtchuk’s work online, and had a very strong sensation: who are they? We need to work with them. That was in 2016 when we were preparing Information Skies. Then we also started a dialogue with Yulia and her then-co-worker, Tania Monakhova, which became the text ‘In spring,’ finally published in PSYOP, 2018. Out of our dialogue it became obvious that we should involve Yulia in Hometown and that we should film half of Hometown in Kyiv (the other half was shot in Beirut). In retrospect we can say that the collaboration with Yulia Yefimtchuk was driven by a mutual appreciation for each other’s practices and also by struggling with similar questions, no matter how far apart we live and no matter our different disciplines and circumstances.
AF
Finally, there are two things which I couldn’t stop thinking about after I saw the exhibition. The first is happiness, and the idea of it. The second is drinking straws. Very different things. But in my mind somehow both are very symptomatic of contemporary capitalism. Could you maybe talk a little bit about these two things?
MH
The festively shaped plastic drinking straw, made in China (and, for that matter, recently banned by the European Union), has a recurring presence in Eurasia. It started with us finding a promotional video about the New Silk Road (or, Belt and Road project), in which two really joyful hosts interview entrepreneurs in a huge market in eastern China. There is an entrepreneur from Senegal who they interview in a restaurant-like room with colourful art on the walls, and they toast with lemonade in wine glasses and exuberant drinking straws. Later the hosts interview the person who manufactures these straws, who then gives this amazing philosophical monologue about the apparent insignificance of the straw itself, which is deceptive, because in reality, it represents ‘a breakthrough,’ as he tries to answer the question, ‘what other things can a straw be used for besides drinking?’ It’s such a dreamlike, funny, and, in a way, beautiful set of scenes, in our view; that’s why we included it and also did our own shoot with wine, earth, and drinking straws for Eurasia
colorful stitches —Nebylitsa, a tale that never happened
market bags is reminiscent of bright-colored steppe clothing with
—The padding that emerges from embroidering these
poems by Marina Tsvetaeva ( Wires , 1923)
—Inspiration from paintings by Rene Daniels (1984) and
work blocks instrumentalization on other terms than its own
work “is about” in that every work is also about itself. So every
—The way in which the work is made undercuts what the
—Neon embroidery —Market bags, faint colors
developments.
stratification of possible choices, storylines, and parallel
were active at the same time, like an almost impenetrable
demonstrated how many different plots and strands of narrative
a screenshot from Avid Media Composer. The image
was “the Game of Thrones final episode timeline,” supposedly
In particular there was that image of what somebody claimed
—Playhead and edit timelines
Some Thoughts on Arrows —Cinematic stills that are not photographs
RMIT Design Hub Gallery has curated a program of events, conversations and resources where we will unfold the concepts that make up Metahaven: Field Report with audiences.
We ask four simple yet fundamental questions, inspired by Australian artist and writer Terry Smith, to learn more about the context of the both the exhibition and the work it presents:
—Who are the artists?
—What are we experiencing?
—How were the works made and when?
—Why is Field Report here at RMIT Design Hub Gallery, and why today?
We will explore reflections and responses with a diverse range of participants including Metahaven (Vinca Kruk and Daniel van der Velden), the exhibition’s guest curators (Brad Haylock and Megan Patty), members of the local design community, filmmakers, artists, and writers. We invite our audience to be an active part of these discussions and share their experiences of the work and to unravel the questions that it raises collectively. All events are free and everyone is welcome.
Who are the artists?
The Capitol Film screening The Sprawl (Propaganda about Propaganda), 2015 Information Skies, 2016 Saturday 7 March 2020, 3—5pm 113 Swanston St, Melbourne VIC 3000 Free. RSVP via Eventbrite.
A special film screening of two of Metahaven’s films, with an introduction from Vinca Kruk and Daniel van der Velden.
What are we experiencing?
Exhibition Talk with Metahaven Friday 13 March 2020, 12—1pm RMIT Design Hub Gallery
An opportunity to hear about the making of Field Report with Metahaven’s Daniel van der Velden and Vinca Kruk and guest curators Megan Patty (NGV) and Brad Haylock (RMIT).
Metahaven: Field Report at MPavilion
Thursday 19 March 2020, 7—8:30pm MPavilion Queen Victoria Gardens, Melbourne. Opposite NGV International & The Arts Centre on St Kilda Road Free. No RSVP required.
Practitioners from a range of disciplines discuss and reflect upon Eurasia (Questions on Happiness), the immersive and dynamic film, sound and textile installation at the centre of the Field Report exhibition.
Moderated by RMIT Design Hub curators Dr Fleur Watson and Kate Rhodes in conversation with Brad Haylock and Megan Patty (guest curators), Ziga Testen, Dr Polly Stanton, Emile Zile, and Ella Egidy.
How were the works made and when?
Behind the Scenes: Making Field Report Wednesday 8 April 2020, 12—1pm RMIT Design Hub Gallery
The Design Hub Gallery team in conversation with exhibition guest curators Megan Patty and Brad Haylock on the process of working with Metahaven to develop Field Report and the making of the works and the exhibition from a curatorial perspective.
Online reader
www.designhub.rmit.edu.au
Throughout the duration of the exhibition, we will build an online archive of reflections on Metahaven’s practice. Focusing on the cultural meanings of key words and concepts embedded within Field Report, the archive will feature writing, reflections and responses from local and international voices. The online reader will broaden out the conversation to add to our understanding of the context in which the work in Field Report has been made.
Why Field Report today? Reporting from the field @rmitdesignhub #fieldreport
Starting Wednesday 22 April and running until the end of the exhibition on Saturday 9 May, RMIT Design Hub Gallery will host a slow Twitter conversation under the hashtag #fieldreport.
Please visit our website for more information: www.designhub.rmit.edu.au
Symposium
The New Normal: The City as Synthetic Cinema presented by Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design, Moscow Thu 12 Mar, 1pm—5pm
National Gallery of Victoria, Clemenger BBDO
Auditorium
Cinema is not just a medium with which to make films about cities; it is rather a material substance out which very cities are made. As the relationship between the moving image and our environments is always changing, cinema as continuous as the city itself, digested within the same synthetic current both synthesizing various media types within a single frame and artificially composing a seemingly coherent whole. This calls for a new urban design literacy, but also for the poetic exploration of new genres of discontinuous cinema and narrative genres; opening new worlds to new inhabitants.
The symposium brings together various voices from adjacent backgrounds whose entry points both into the “synthetic” and “cinema” challenge conventional assumptions and explore radical new potentials.
Speakers include Liam Young, Nashin Mahani, Nicolay Boyadjiev, Olga Tenisheva and Metahaven.
Field Report is realised by Metahaven, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Field Report is presented in collaboration with the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), and is part of Melbourne Design Week 2020 and the Melbourne Art Book Fair.
Eurasia (Questions on Happiness), 2018, was originally produced by the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, and co-commissioned with the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and Sharjah Art Foundation. The film was supported by the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw and Creative Industries Fund NL and generously assisted by Strelka Institute, Moscow.
Guest exhibition curators Brad Haylock (RMIT) and Megan Patty (NGV)
RMIT Design Hub Gallery
Curators: Kate Rhodes, Fleur Watson Creative Producer: Nella Themelios Production Coordinator: Erik North Production Assistant: Tim McLeod Curatorial Assistant: Michaela Bear Operations Assistant: Síofra Lyons Exhibition production team: Ari Sharp, Simon Maisch, Robert Jordan, Mason Cox, Duncan Freedman Gallery Assistants: Ian Bunyi, Luke Pringipas Exhibition and publication volunteers: Jade Armstrong, Mada Aldeeb, Mariana Blanco, Lloyd Collins, Majed Fayad, Nina Gibbes, Zeyu Li (Zac), Kathleen Page, Grace Pavey, Saumya Mutneja, Revati Tongaonkar, Samuel Torre, Yunyi Xie, Xiangyi Xu, Wanqing Yue (Echo)
RMIT Design Hub Gallery, RMIT University
RMIT Design Hub Gallery exists to ask questions about design’s role in the world today. Through exhibitions, conversations, performances and publications, we explore the process of design —making space to imagine, test and risk new ideas together. Founded within RMIT University, the Design Hub Gallery has its roots in the city and in research practice. But most of all we are a public place, a zone for exploration and a platform for exchange, locally and internationally. We are an open space for discovery, questioning and experimentation.
RMIT University acknowledges the people of the Woi wurrung and Boon wurrung language groups of the eastern Kulin Nations on whose unceded lands we conduct the business of the University.
Location
RMIT Design Hub Gallery, Level 2, Building 100, corner Victoria and Swanston Streets, Carlton, 3053 Entrance via the Victoria Street forecourt
Contact hello.designhub@rmit.edu.au designhub.rmit.edu.au
Follow us @rmitdesignhub on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter
ISBN: 978-0-6484022-3-7
Disclaimer
RMIT University has made every effort to trace copyright holders and provide correct crediting and acknowledgements in consultation with the providers of the exhibition.
Anastasiia Fedorova▼M.E.S.H.▼MHUribus, sam soluptur audioria dempos ad modiata tiunt.
line producer: Kirill Verkhozin
director of photography: Dima Mishin
Russian Federation produced by Red Pepper Film, Ekaterinburg
Ifeanyi Awachie, Chris Rawcliffe
Producer Richard Birkett Production assistants
Kuedo
Original
Cast Ilya Lim, Lucie de Bréchard, Timur Saulebaev
London
sound recording Marcus Fraser: Soho Radio Studios,
Studios, Amsterdam sculpture: Made by Mistake, Rotterdam
sound design and mix: Juan Pablo Thummler, Wave
Amsterdam additional photography: Metahaven
Bandit, Amsterdam studio and lighting equipment: Singelfilm,
Roman Häfliger camera equipment; Camera Rentals, Amsterdam;
set assistants: Richard Birkett, Lucie de Bréchard,
focus puller, camera assistant: Ralph van de Weijer
Netherlands director of photography: Remko Schnorr
Transport JSC Skopje, Pepi Manevski
thanks to: City of Skopje, Macedonian Railways
translated into the French by Lucie de Bréchard
How the Enlightenment Ends, 2018
and riffing off Henry Kissinger (1923-)
Pragmatism & the Question of Truth, 1914
Review Books Émile Durkheim (1858-1917)
used by permission of the translator and New York
interview: Ivana Dragsic (Freedom Square)
Nestorovska focus puller and camera assistant: Kiril Shentevski
line producers: Vladimir Anastasov, Angela
thanks to: Karen Archey, Ajdin Basic, Beam Systems ► FIELD REPORT► ▼ CREDITS ▼
Snow Lies, 1930 translated from the Russian by Eugene Ostashevsky
director of photography: Dimitar Popov
Macedonia produced by Sektor Film, Skopje
Macedonian: Angela Nestorovska ► The New Easthetic ►
thanks to: Nina Donis, FAKOSHIMA eyewear
studio: Photostudio KISA
Alexander Vvedensky (1904-1941)
Silentium!, 1833 translated from the Russian by Vladimir Nabokov
subtitles editor: Maxim Yakimov
driver: Valeriy Leonidovich
Fyodor Tyutchev (1803-1873)
translated from the Russian by Elaine Feinstein
I know the truth, 1915
Metahaven Citations Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1916)
Eurasia (Questions on Happiness)
props assistant: Masha Orlova
make-up: Sasha Vanhanen
garments: Nina Donis
stylist: Marina Malinovskaya
drone operator: Anton Smetanin
grip: Valeria Gabysheva
key grip: Ivan Solovyev
gaffer: Andrey Khudyakov
associate line producer: Evgenii M arkov assistant line producer: Mikhail Kremeshkov
Amsterdam, Dmitrii Bezouglov,
Bandit Amsterdam, Steven Cairns, Zhenya Chaika, Judith Greer, Bart van der Heide, Stefan Kalmár, Anna Klec, Estelle Marois, Varvara Melnikova, Andreas Nikolopoulos, Ippolito Pestellini, Olga Polishuk, Daria Sazanovich, Natalia Sielewicz, Olga Tenisheva, Hoor Al Qasimi, Sofie Vos Arrows Metahaven Vinca Kruk, Daniel van der Velden with Lucie de Bréchard, Roman Häfliger, Shui Zong Exhibition architecture Andreas Nikolopoulos Textile production collaborators Textielmuseum Textielab, Frank de Wind EE Labels, Robin Matulessy Plastic bags Dappermarkt, Amsterdam
Italian: Leonardo Dellanoce
French: Lucie de Bréchard
Music Translations Russian: Anastasia Kubrak
J.G. Biberkopf courtesy of Knives Knives / Just Isn’t
Just Isn’t Music
all Kuedo tracks courtesy of Ninja Tunes / Knives /
3D animation: Theo Cook
design assistant: Roman Häfliger, Lucie de Bréchard
OUR SMARTPHONES VIBRATE. At a glance, we know that our friend is eating Korean BBQ, that it is about to rain, that Britain has now left the European Union, that Australia is still burning, and that a cat in North Carolina is snoring in a particularly photogenic way. But these notifications don’t help us to navigate our supersaturated existence. They don’t tell us who made the news we’re reading, or why the weather is so extreme, or which region produced the rare-earth metals in our phones that allow them to vibrate in the first place.
Our smartphones at once shape our realities and have vexed material realities of their own, but such devices are only the most obvious symbol of the complexities and paradoxes of our contemporary life. Things are instantaneously available yet impenetrable. Connectedness is high but transparency is low. Media literacy and platform literacy alike have become essential competencies. In some ways, the essential problem of mediation today is much the same as it was a century ago, but in other ways the problem has accelerated to the point of invisibility and has become compounded beyond recognition. Ubiquitous computing has produced a new geopolitical reality, an ‘accidental megastructure’ that Benjamin Bratton has named ‘the Stack’.
The work of Metahaven, equally evocatively poetic and profoundly critical, helps us to reflect upon our contemporary condition. In this exhibition, the film Eurasia (Questions on Happiness), 2018, offers a portrait of the Ural region, which is today a part of the
Russian Federation but which has historically been more clearly defined geographically than politically. The Ural mountains encroach upon the Eurasian Steppe, a vast belt of temperate grasslands that stretches almost the full width of the continent, and which for millennia hosted important overland trade routes. At the unofficial border of Europe and Asia, this region has much in common with the unceded lands that have been referred to as ‘Australia’ for a mere two centuries. In both places, indigenous histories, the scars of colonisation and industrialisation, and post-global geopolitical realities co-exist in uneasy tension.
A series of new textile works, Arrows I , II & III , 2020, extends the collective’s long-standing concern for the rhetorical potential of unexpected combinations of genre, media and material. Intimate detail, public address, disarmingly well-crafted turns of phrase and the residue of the everyday are at once woven together and exploded as multichannel speculative historiography.
Through incisive storytelling, tactical remediation and a deconstructive disposition, Metahaven draw together and draw into focus the machinations of the database, the library, the screen, the Stack, the Steppe and the street. Field Report compels us to ask: how are place and knowledge, information and material, and history and vitality entwined in ways that are equally seductive and dangerous?
—Brad Haylock and Megan PattyTHE WORK OF METAHAVEN consists of filmmaking, writing and design, and is united conceptually by interests in poetry, storytelling and digital superstructures. Films by Metahaven include The Sprawl (Propaganda about Propaganda), 2015, Information Skies, 2016, Hometown, 2018, Eurasia (Questions on Happiness), 2018, and Elektra, 2019. Recent solo exhibitions include Version History, ICA, London, 2018; Earth, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 2018 and Turnarounds, e-flux, New York, 2019. Recent group exhibitions include Ghost:265, Bangkok, 2018; Sharjah Biennial, 2017 and Gwangju Biennale, 2016. Recent publications by Metahaven include PSYOP: An Anthology, 2018, edited with Karen Archey, published by Koenig Books, and Digital Tarkovsky, 2018, published by Strelka Press, Moscow.
