dendro dreams

An audiovisual study on the utopian territory of the Ukrainian nuclear cities. The film is made of TV and film chronicles of 1970-86, filmed in six Ukrainian nuclear cities. The construction of nuclear cities, the nuclear power plants satellite towns, has started in the USSR in 1950s, in Ukraine in 1970s. The building of these new type cities was accompanied by the hype of the 'eternal' kind of power conquest and recreation of the utopian Lenin's images. The nuclear cities embodied the leading ideological, city planning, ecological, and scientific ambitions. In 1970-80, when the Soviet state was going through the social and ideological crisis, the nuclear cities were the reservations of the Soviet utopia. This is a film about overcoming the contradictions of the final USSR years, based on the image of a utopian nuclear city.

Television has changed our world. However, do we realize the scope of this metamorphosis? This audiovisual research investigates the first two decades of the mass spreading of Ukrainian television. One of its centers was Lviv, where in 1957, a plant for production of TV equipment was launched, and the first Ukrainian TV-sets branded Lviv were produced.

According to the medieval religious text Alphabet of ben Sirach, Lilith was the first wife of Adam. Unlike Eve, she refused to obey her husband and considered herself equal to him. Lilith's Community is a virtual utopian sorority created through artistic revision of history on the basis of positive gender discrimination and rejection of the tradition of male domination. Lilith's Community is compiled out of eleven Ukrainian films of 1917-1930 by leaving only the episodes involving women. The editing was done not by creating artificial connections between the episodes, but by superimposing all source films according to the original chronology of episodes in each of them. Even with such hyperdensity, the film sometimes displays a black screen. It indicates that at this particular moment of the running time none of the eleven films featured a woman.

A museum guide shows around the historical guns room. Weapon manufacturers exhibit their latest products at the trade fair. A girl decides to resist weapon circulation in society and destroys a stolen gun.

A young girl makes images, which does not bring her any income. She can hardly afford renting a room where she spends most of her time. At a certain moment, she experiences an incident that she wants to share with her brother. Will they be able to talk?

This purely observational film, underscored by the noise and sounds of protests, explores, in static frontal shots or from above, the spontaneous architecture of seven Kiev barricades erected in the streets leading to Independence Square. The film does not explore the conflict itself, but is a bizarre homage to the anonymous engineers of revolt.

ZONG explores the phenomenon of the swamp from different perspectives: as a locus of fears in the folklore of agricultural societies; as an exploited landscape in the industrial age; as a complex system of ties between species within the posthumanist paradigm.

On March 4, 2022, the Russian troops occupied Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Station, the largest nuclear power plant in Europe. The day before they entered its satellite town, Enerhodar, and attacked resisting civilians who barricaded the road to the nuclear power plant. Founded in the early 1970s, Enerhodar (‘the energy gift’) was meant to serve the thermal power station and the nuclear power plant. Its construction was part of the Soviet modernist project championing industrialization, urban growth and new nuclear technologies. After its occupation, Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant was turned into a time bomb. The infrastructure of ‘peaceful atom’ was weaponized and used as a means of nuclear blackmail. In a grim twist, the colonial Soviet ambition to control the forces of nature culminated in Russian war atrocities and ecocide of the planetary scale.

Based on Ukrainian works of art of the late 1920s and early 1930s, the film explores the paradoxes of the formation of Soviet socialist realism.

A reflection on modern globalized cities, their controversial past, and personal spatial memory.