After months of hard work and inciting conversations, ArtEZ Studium Generale presents this awe-inspiring and incisive artistic project, written, narrated, illustrated and coded by our intern Kseniia Anokhina.
Lacing Lands: moving in relation, is an artistic research project, written, narrated, illustrated and coded by Kseniia Anokhina who studies Design Art Technology at ArtEZ Arnhem. It is part of and made in collaboration with ArtEZ Studium Generale for the programme LAND, on ownership, climate breake-down and co-existence.
“We have forgotten of how strongly we are all tied to land, and to the resources and space it provides, how much it influences all the complex workings of our politics and day-to-day lives”, Kseniia writes.
In her project Kseniia explores this idea and the fractured, vast and mediated landscape by crafting intimate spaces that she found herself in across two countries, classrooms, histories, memories, and times. For these stories she created an audio-visual experience which invites readers to engage with her stories in these different spaces. We invite you to explore the different layers of the stories, and move through these spaces along with Kseniia Anokhina.
Website Lacing Lands: moving in relation
On land, politics and advocacy work, as told through the spaces I found myself in
My name is Kseniia, I’m 20 years old, I am a third year student of the Art, Design & Technology department in Arnhem, and have just finished my internship at ArtEZ studium generale.
I am from Moscow, and I currently live on a hill. I don’t exactly know who I am — designer, writer, illustrator, researcher, programmer— and I don’t think I should. But I know that moving lands has affected my perspective greatly, I know that existing in between fields of art and technology allows me to get into places I wouldn’t get to otherwise and I know that sometimes I don’t want to go out, because I dread biking back up the hill.
This patchwork brings together my accounts of day- to-day experiences and how they inform, evoke and necessitate my politics. Answering phone on a hotline for protestors during unrest in Russia for 12 hours straight, going to open mines at Hambach forest with my class where people protest destruction of the forest while huge pointless machines roar on the background and then reading Bruno Latour on Critical Zones for Honours Program on the way back while the bus is shaking slightly
All these experiences are ways to experience land and various impacts of various policies, weaving a huge never-ending pattern.
This project is a lacing of how I position myself, and hopefully, a route to helping you to position yourself, too.
You can visit the website and follow different routes: listen to some of the spaces I find myself in and maybe see how our urgencies overlap, read a short interview tied together with a collection of various advocacy work examples and theories talking about them.
For the best experience, please, open the website on your desktop and use Chrome or Tor Browser.
As my next step I want to shift the attention from my personal experiences to creating an intricate archive of all the connections between various ways of engaging with advocacy work. I would love to further this collaboration with researchers and artists working whose practice is informed and shaped by advocacy work.
