A r t
Emptiness: Ways of Seeing
Digital Exhibition and VR Experience
Presented at the Emptiness Project Conference, Emptiness: Ways of Seeing, Rīga Stradiņš, in Riga, Latvia
as one of four invited artists at the event.
https://emptiness.eu/news-and-events/emptiness-ways-of-seeing-conference-registration/
Film Descriptions:
Granny's Bones (The Outsider's Gaze)
Granny’s Bones, comprises an installation and a diptych-film in VR. The two VR films face each other, as two people do in meeting. This one represents the Outsider's or Anthropologist's perspective, looking in at the native reindeer herders, observing the winter taiga, always with the sense of something eluding them. The empty spaces between observation and meaning, what is heard and what is understood, slipping through like a hiatus the phenomenal world of the observer. The piece is inspired by the peculiar story of the encounters surrounding Maria Czaplicka, a female Oxford anthropologist who embarked on an expedition up the Yenisei River in central Siberia to study the Evenki people in 1914. Czaplicka returned with much of the museum’s current collections of material culture from native Siberia and with one of the earliest comprehensive accounts of Siberian shamanism. Her visits incurred a disturbance in the places she passed. She desecrated the graves of her hosts’ grandparents in order to retrieve artifacts and human bones for the museum. Upon her return to England, Maria Czaplicka took her own life. In 2019, I followed Maria Czaplicka’s tracks up the Yenisei River of central Siberia to a contemporary Evenkia. I found an unfinished conversation of two cultures facing each other: daguerreotypes, letters, lantern slides, grant proposals, maps, post cards, travel cheques, lecture notes, receipts. Although Czaplicka was registered as buried in three different English cities, all the cemeteries denied having her on account of her suicide. Combing through the graves I found her ruined tomb and began to conceive of a fictive universe in which a little wolf haunted the disturbed graves of two grandmothers who could not find their peace. Two absences facing each other described an emptiness in between – searching for that emptiness became the mission of my piece. Granny’s Bones explores the experience of Evenki reindeer herders (an indigenous Siberian people who live in the vast tracts of taiga east of the Yenisei River) with a legacy of colonial extraction. Beginning with the encounter with an Oxford anthropologist, Maria Czaplicka, at the turn of the 20th century, the film encounters a series of absences. The absence of the reindeer herds (which were lost after the fall of the Soviet Union), the loss of Evenki language and culture, forcibly erased in the Internaty (residential schools) during collectivization, and the absence of bones and artefacts that Czaplicka extracted from Evenki gravesites and carried back with her to Oxford. The spirit of this disturbance finds form in the figure of Irgichit’kan, Волчок, or Little Wolf, who begins to haunt the places where Czaplicka passed – the emptying postindustrial towns, the graveyard where her own grave now lies, and the frozen-over expanse of the Stony Tunguska river on which, it is said, the spirits of the local shamans flew away and disappeared, after a mass-execution by the Soviet state in the 1930s. Ever present in the films is the emptiness of the taiga, in which the greater sense of absence, the spirits of the «Белый Шум» (a traditional Russian conception of energy-in-void, not TV static) can be seen.
Granny's Bones (Эвенкийский Взгляд)
Granny’s Bones, comprises an installation and a diptych-film in VR. The two VR films face each other, as two people do in meeting. This one represents the Evenki perspective, looking out at the Emptiness of the winter raiga and observing the stranger, coming into their midst. The piece is inspired by the peculiar story of the encounters surrounding Maria Czaplicka, a female Oxford anthropologist who embarked on an expedition up the Yenisei River in central Siberia to study the Evenki people in 1914. Czaplicka returned with much of the museum’s current collections of material culture from native Siberia and with one of the earliest comprehensive accounts of Siberian shamanism. Her visits incurred a disturbance in the places she passed. She desecrated the graves of her hosts’ grandparents in order to retrieve artifacts and human bones for the museum. Upon her return to England, Maria Czaplicka took her own life. In 2019, I followed Maria Czaplicka’s tracks up the Yenisei River of central Siberia to a contemporary Evenkia. I found an unfinished conversation of two cultures facing each other: daguerreotypes, letters, lantern slides, grant proposals, maps, post cards, travel cheques, lecture notes, receipts. Although Czaplicka was registered as buried in three different English cities, all the cemeteries denied having her on account of her suicide. Combing through the graves I found her ruined tomb and began to conceive of a fictive universe in which a little wolf haunted the disturbed graves of two grandmothers who could not find their peace. Two absences facing each other described an emptiness in between – searching for that emptiness became the mission of my practice. Granny’s Bones explores the experience of Evenki reindeer herders (an indigenous Siberian people who live in the vast tracts of taiga east of the Yenisei River) with a legacy of colonial extraction. Beginning with the encounter with an Oxford anthropologist, Maria Czaplicka, at the turn of the 20th century, the film encounters a series of absences. The absence of the reindeer herds (which were lost after the fall of the Soviet Union), the loss of Evenki language and culture, forcibly erased in the Internaty (residential schools) during collectivization, and the absence of bones and artefacts that Czaplicka extracted from Evenki gravesites and carried back with her to Oxford. The spirit of this disturbance finds form in the figure of Irgichit’kan, Волчок, or Little Wolf, who begins to haunt the places where Czaplicka passed – the emptying postindustrial towns, the graveyard where her own grave now lies, and the frozen-over expanse of the Stony Tunguska river on which, it is said, the spirits of the local shamans flew away and disappeared, after a mass-execution by the Soviet state in the 1930s. The film is created as a diptych because it remains painfully conscious of the experience of being observed: the first is from the point of view of the artist coming into a community, the second, from the point of view of a community watching a stranger coming in. Ever present in the films is the emptiness of the taiga, in which the greater sense of absence, the spirits of the «Белый Шум» (a traditional Russian conception of energy-in-void, not TV static) can be seen.
Granny's Bones
I am thinking about Maria.
or Марья.
or Marie Antoinette de Czaplicka (ridiculous).
about her achievements, her blunders and our complicity.
At the turn of the 19th century many people thought about Maria:
an exceptional Oxford anthropologist, a woman, or, a “Man of Science”
(her own words), “a Healing Woman” (words of native Sibiriaki),
“a pure flame too intense for mortal body” (words of her male Oxford supervisor),
“her own mistress for too many years” (a professor at Oxford).
Not so much now.
Her grave is broken, grown over with small yellow flowers.
I am thinking about Tilka’s grandmother. Her grave is broken too.
I am thinking about the involuntary entanglements we stumble through and the broader choreography of anthropology performing its own antics and transformations through time.
She writes of the performances of the shaman witnessed in 1915; how he “falls to the ground unconscious, while his soul is wandering in the other worlds, talking with the spirits and asking them for advice.”
She is unwittingly enacting a very similar performance of her own.
She travels to the “worlds” of the Evenki peoples she deems “other,” and simultaneously, by articulating them as such, she begins to create a cultural imaginary world, her own conception of Siberian reality, through which others will later wander, seeking advice from a long deceased “spirit” anthropologist (Maria commits suicide in 1921) to reconstruct a cultural reality in the present.
I am getting entangled in this choreography.
I can hear the rattling of their bones.