Aliaksandra Yakubouskaya /BLR/
Imaginative dream(E)scape, 2021
Video, 14:53
The everyday life in the Czech-German-Polish border area, a zone on the borders between three countries, has been and still is influenced by the history of the 20th century. Second World War events, border shifts and population movements, different political state systems, and cultural stereotypes continue to shape the mutual perceptions. Currently, the relations have been seriously affected by the disputes regarding the brown coal mining in the Turow mine. With her animated video, the author speculates on how to recall and reassess the past and the future of a region with a traumatic past and present. She views both the visible boundaries and the invisible internal borders through the prism of space and time and imagines how the collective traumas of countries can be revisited and reconstructed. To do this, she uses the element of water as a matter that washes away, dissolves and cleans the memory of the past, the present and the as-yet non-existent future. Memories are seen as a part of our collective dream experience and share qualities similar to the fluidity of water.
The text used in the film is based on interviews with people living in the border region and their visions for the future. The film is part of the documentary performance, Zona Kontaktu/ Kontaktzone. In collaboration with Goglemogl produktion and Das Institut für Sächsische Geschichte und Volkskunde.
virtual participation in video: Ctirad Götz, Tereza Konrádová, Veronika Kyrianová, Václav Marhold, Hana Müllerová, Richard Němec & David Helán a Artur Konrád
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Aliaksandra Yakubouskaya is a visual artist from Belarus, based in Prague and Berlin. She works with installation-based performances and co-creates spaces that often provoke or enable interaction with participants. Her projects are based on thorough field research that includes trips and interviews, interactions with people, and body practices and experiments such as non-verbal communication, collective sleeping sessions, etc. Using various materials and processes, the creates spaces in between and places of connection.