On 10 June, we launched a year-long project of the LAB Interdisciplinary Art Lab: DOCU/SYNTHESIS x Ukraine War Archive; we will share some details about it soon. In addition, this year the DOCU/SYNTHESIS PROGRAMME, which explores documentary films on crossovers with other media and disciplines, presented three projects from Ukrainian and international artists and curators.
The theme of the festival this year is marking time and appealing to the continuity of history, its linearity and cyclicity at the same time. I interpreted this as an intention to work with memory,” says the program’s curator, Oleksandra Nabieva. “In his essay Image of Proust, Walter Benjamin states that an effort to remember is similar to an effort to forget. A dense matter of memory needs to be unfolded carefully: from the smallest details to the tiniest ones. Thus, this programme includes the work with united and personal archives, commemorative artistic practices, sound and its “documentation,” and common spaces — lost, almost lost, phantom, potential, imaginary, and real.
The festival guide editor Daria Badyor talked with all the programme’s participants about the ideas that stand behind their works, and their reflections about the nature of documentary and its future.
Volodymyr Kuznetsov, Anthology of Ukrainian Cuisine 2022–2024 
Your project description says that it is a homage to Ukrainian volunteers. What is special for you in this particular phenomenon, and what would you like to highlight with this project?
Ukrainian society has not experienced it at this scale before. Volunteering was boosted by the Maidans; they inspired it with new strength, they were a practical school of volunteering.
Volunteering means making network connections of various configurations, based on the characteristic ‘mutual’ or the prefix ‘co-’: co-participation, compassion, cooperation. It was probably this poignant ‘co-’ that I wanted to highlight in my work. There is no more important cuisine today than the volunteer cuisine, hence the name. I say Ukrainian cuisine, but I mean volunteer cuisine because the condition of our defenders on the frontlines depends on it, both their physical and, to a large extent, their spiritual condition.
The DOCU/Synthesis programme is interdisciplinary, and offers us an opportunity to think about the phenomenon of documentary through various media. What is documentary for you, and what was it like for you to work with documentary material today? What opportunities and what limitations do you see for yourself as an artist here?
Documentary for me is practice, life moments, situations, felt and experienced, which I reflect in a certain form, in this case in the form of video, film. While documenting volunteer initiatives, I recently decided to use the format of a social media ad in the smartphone format, vertical images. I’ve recently been making Instagram videos with requests for donations and calls to join volunteer work. We managed to raise relatively small but helpful amounts for weaving nets.
Now at the festival, there’s another occasion to talk about volunteering, which is among the most important things today. Probably since the Maidan of 2013-2014 I’ve become deeply aware that this is the most important: to use your artistic work and skill for practical purposes, especially in such critical periods for our survival. Today the work of an artist for me, the documentation of volunteer movements, is to archive the processes which matter in society right now, during this extreme time. It means joining the creation of an archive of solidarity gestures, an archive of public social acts.
I also use audio in the festival project. There are some audio works, which I invited the composer Maryana Klochko to co-create.
DOCU/Synthesis does interdisciplinary collaborations with the Ukraine War Archive. I was offered the chance to work with the Archive and participate in DOCU/Synthesis by Oleksandra Nabieva, the curator of DOCU/SYNTHESIS. In the Archive I looked for documents similar to the ones I’ve been filming for a while myself, namely those related to the phrase ‘volunteer cuisine’. As part of the festival, I showed videos and audios from the Archive and use my own materials which I am submitting for the Archive.
Working with the Ukraine War Archive is rather unusual. It is based on a complex scheme with layers of protection; it aims first and foremost to collect testimonies about the war. Out of more than 40,000 files, we found what we needed quickly using the ‘search by tags’ option.
It is important for me to work with documentary materials now. For me it is a way to spread information about the war and the related processes, a way to talk about situations which need to be solved. There are still people who don’t understand something, who have illusions about Russia’s war against Ukraine. I want to tell them about this. I can see my foreign friends distancing themselves from the war in their daily lives, so I’d like to communicate more information to them, so that they can pass it on. This is important for us: we need attention, help, resources, weapons.
Modern art is unlimited in its instruments, and for each artwork the artist chooses appropriate material, the appropriate means to implement their idea. For me right now, working with documentary materials from our reality is the most relevant.
Sasha Andrusyk, Listening to Absence: Sound Archives of (Non-)Empty Rooms
How would you describe the main idea behind your project in the programme? What would you like to communicate or offer the audience?
War, among other things, is a colossal sound event made up of numerous sound subevents, and all of them together turn a person listening to a person heeding. Heeding not only the sound of potential threat to their life, not only the sound of death or the sound expression of grief — I am convinced that this heeding changes us forever — but also in general the urban vernacular that forms with the war and their own memories about the city before the war. I have become such a person; such people surround me today, and it is important for me to capture this state, to hear it captured in order to describe and understand it later when the opportunity arises.
The shortest path to a story about a person heeding are field recordings, documentary sound. Maybe cinema is also going to work with this; maybe it already does, and these sound archives will soon become part of films. But I am from a listener organisation, and for me listening to documentary sound stands on its own; it is interesting for me to follow the images that are produced in me and in others by sound.
Since your project is part of an interdisciplinary programme at a documentary film festival, what in your opinion does it add to the conversation about the nature of documentary? What is a document from the perspective of your project?
The document in this project is the field recordings, literally; but an audio recording of a private conversation with a friend is also a document here, to the same extent as an audio recording of a private conversation with a musical instrument in a suddenly empty and threatened city. It is easier to describe what a conversation with a friend communicates to the audience than to categorise the message created with the instrument, but we do not necessarily testify or remember in categories. We also remember with states, we imagine with states — and this is the thought that we add to the conversation.
In addition, there has been little work with documentary sound in Ukraine until now, and I am interested in the authors’ ways of working with this material, which sometimes directly contradict one another. In the case of Oleh Shpudeiko, it is about a statement in which field recordings are points of entry into certain states which are then intensified by artistic intervention; he listens to the literal expression of his memory, and then tries to communicate through music his own perception of that memory and the space where he goes because of it.
Ian Spektor’s way is very similar to documentary cinema; the only intervention in the field recordings here is their editing and overlapping of one track with another. It is not a musical work, but a sound work; it is called an audio play because it has characters and story arcs.
The third installation shuffles the cards: the document here is music itself, recorded by people at home in the spring of 2022.
Fragments from SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA
What would you say is the main idea behind your part of the programme? What does the audience need to know about the films before watching them?
Beth Hughes: We wanted to give a broad impression of what SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA stands for, as a physical space of exchange in Berlin, and how it emerges from a longer-term project called bi’bak.
Bi’bak was founded in 2014 as a small project space for exhibitions and screenings, but also dinners and gatherings. The focus from the very start has been on creating space for narratives that, despite their relevance for large sections of society, have typically been underrepresented or ignored, a platform for stories of migration and immigration that are often excluded from the official narratives of the German state.
Galo Enrique Rivera: There is a normative tendency in Germany to put racialised working-class people from the so-called ‘global south’ in the box of ‘immigrants in need of integration’. Part of what SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA stands for, and what we want to convey with this programme is the importance of bringing transnational narratives, problems and aesthetics to Germany to educate ourselves and others about how things can be done differently, sometimes better; and how transnational solidarity can bring understanding of the other as self.
Our vision also recognises that communities living in Germany coming from diverse territories around the world need spaces where we can reconnect with the stories that shape our identities. Both of the films have been shown earlier in the beginnings of our space, but still guide us in this direction.
Beth: Tuncel Kurtiz’s 1978 documentary E5 Ölüm Yolu / Gastarbeiterstrasse is a work that embodies many of these aims. Gastarbeiter literally translates to guest-worker, and here refers to the West-German government's policy of fulfilling labour shortages by inviting economic migrants from other countries to temporarily live and work in Germany from the mid-1950s onwards. Agreements were reached with many Southern European countries and beyond; the largest group was from Turkey. Though they faced multiple forms of everyday and systematic racism, many guest workers had built a life in Germany in the meantime and stayed.
Kurtiz follows assorted groups of people as they travel from Germany along the E5, a dangerous, sometimes deadly journey, to Turkey where they hope to visit the family, friends and places they left behind. It is a crucial historical document that reveals the human face which lies behind the official data of migration.
Galo: The documentary Cien niños esperando un tren premiered in 1988 and follows the efforts of Chilean teacher Alicia Vega to introduce the children of a rural working-class settlement near the capital city to the world of cinema. Filmed during the Pinochet military dictatorship, the documentary could be seen as an honest anthropological record of the effects of a highly militarised society on children. Nearly 40 years after its premiere, the film continues to inspire us, demonstrating how cinema, combined with a spirit of solidarity and recursive teaching strategies, can have a powerful impact that brings hope beyond borders.
DOCU/Synthesis is a programme showcasing interdisciplinary experiments with documentary films. What does that mean for you? How can we expand our notion of documentary cinema with an interdisciplinary approach?
Discussion with curators of SİNEMA TRANSTOPIA Beth Hughes and Galo Enrique Rivera. Photo: Polina Polikarpova
Beth: Interdisciplinary means no easy answers and multiple audiences. A lot of sincere and genuine energy is required from people to make it work — not just the SİNEMA team, but from those who visit us too. How willing are we to challenge our preconceived ideas?
Galo: The terms experimental and interdisciplinary represent a decision to move beyond hegemonic notions of what documentary filmmaking is. In the current context, experimental means not limiting the aesthetics and practices of filmmaking to what is pleasing or informative to bourgeois audiences in places where cinema is a massive commodity industry.
Interdisciplinary refers to who actually makes films and profits from them. Interdisciplinary filmmaking is not limited to film experts, since no branch of human knowledge is useful within a segregated bubble of expertise. Interdisciplinary filmmaking also has a strong component of inclusivity within it. It recognises that knowledge should come from all sectors of society, including those who have not had the privilege of building a traditional academic career or who are sought after by the film industry.
For you, what is the future of documentary filmmaking?
Beth: Formally, more fragmented and exploded forms of image making: phones, found footage, AI generated. This is already happening, of course, but I believe it will only accelerate. The trick will be plotting a path through these digital image forms that says something substantial about life beyond the screen. The biggest challenge will be to break out of a kind of digital monadism and encourage discussion and exchange around films, which is, after all, their purpose.
Galo: With increasing access to technology and distribution, I see and hope that the future of documentaries lies in the hands of the protagonists. I am very curious to see how films are made when protagonists reclaim our own narratives, and how this shapes our notions of community and collective belonging. In some ways, this is already happening, but we rely on algorithms to shape narratives and select films for us. Unfortunately, these algorithms still reproduce harmful hegemonic human biases. I hope that there will be more transparency and accessibility in the new technologies to make them more useful and reliable for all of us. I also hope that there will be more spaces where the human element is recognised as the most important and truly reliable source of authenticity.
Author: Daria Badior
Photo: Anna Soli, Stas Kartashov, Polina Polikarpova
