Before and After a Big Day

25 October 2019 • Yana Bachynska
Video, 4:26
The sequence of both found and made video footage and photos captures the most canonical aspects of public life, highlighting the hierarchical and identifying principles. Each narrative segment is divided into two parts: before and after 1991. The voice-over narration aims to combine, although not reconcile, the images.

Before and After a Big Day

Everyday routine, tortured by glimpses of stories, is what constitutes a basic description of the following images. We found ourselves in the active realm of creating a conventionally new human. This conventionality has deep roots. Juxtaposing iconological aspects of certain images with the ones preceding them is the key to understand this conventionality. Each of the demonstrated subjects becomes a commentary to how societies build their borders and try to separate themselves from the previous time and regime and, for sure, from other societies. Such attempts aim to maintain the safety, or rather the illusion of it, since it’s about images that are being created for postulating certain principles of identification.

Existing in two systems, with Ukrainian Independence Day in between, we deal with seemingly opposed approaches to forming this symbolic safety. Chronologically, the first one tries to look pioneer-like free of layers left by preceding humanities. On the contrary, the second one aims to find the connection with its past that was cut off by the first approach. What do these both approaches miss while scrutinising each other? Aren’t they drawing from the same source, or worst of all, aren’t they a source for one another?

It’s the form that exposes them, the form they created in order to separate themselves and solidify their differences.

EN | UKR