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Geometry of Soviet Women
ARTEFACTOURISTS
Artefactourists is secretly a pseudo-acronym for: the act of remembering through movement; memories triggered by travelling through places and artefacts.
As dancers and choreographers, Artefactourists engage with European museum and archiving traditions, reading objects, and mediating history, while considering the body a legitimate source of knowledge. Our autobiographical investigation includes memory, labour, and the inherited working body in the Eastern European context.
Our co-creative nomadic performance practice concentrates on the experience of rooting amongst scattered identities. It involves triggering memories and stories through places and objects, translating them, reinterpreting, or doubting them. We scrutinize personal memory and collective memory, allowing new narratives to form, constructing and reconstructing identity.
We resist the idea of a fixed personal and collective heritage, but explore heritage as a shifting thought, related to location, memory, and archives.
artefactourism.com
FILM
‘Geometry of Soviet Women’ is a dance film featuring four dance artists performing inside the 19th-century abandoned textile factory - The Kreenholm Manufacturing Company in Narva, Estonia.
The enormous factory building is situated along the banks of the Narva river, on the border between Russia and Estonia. The horror-like movie site was considered in its time to be the most important cotton spinning and manufacturing mill in Russin Empire, owning 32,000 acres of land and employing 12,000 people. Primarily inhabited and staed by women, the site saw historical significance in 1872 when the first labor strike in Estonia occurred. This event, considered one of the earliest labor strikes in the then Russian Empire, is also recognized as an early feminist movement.
The 'Geometry of Soviet Women' dance film endeavors to explore the challenges and heritage traumas faced by women workers from the Soviet era. It aligns with composer Nino Davadze's vision to create music that empowers and highlights the resilience of women from the Eastern Bloc.
labour resilience
resistance
The Kreenholm Factory’s geopolitical relation to industrial innovation offers another kind of space our ancestors moved in.
I asked, considering dynamics between memory, archives, and location, how is a sense of belonging constructed?
Charged with different site-specific memories and multiple temporalities, I asked what kind of entanglements are already there to be unearthed?
SCORES:
Naming / Writing: I see…I feel…I think
Meditation and Reading
Resistance and Material
Collective Care
Resilience through repetition Decomposition and Collapse..?..
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