Message 5: Zola Chichmintseva-Kondamambou

Hi. My name is Zola Chichmintseva-Kondamambou, and I’m here to answer the collective’s question “How to be next to each other”. I’d like to answer in two parts. First of all, being next to each other is always a compromise. A compromise between silence and talking, it’s a conversation that at times might be silent, and thus it’s important to know when and where to speak, and when and where to listen, to acknowledge, and to advocate. It’s the importance of space, and, sometimes, the importance of rage.

And as for part two, I’d like to read an extract to you from a book by Saidiya Hartman called Lose Your Mother*. In it, she confronts the trajectories of deportation to link slavery from one side of the Atlantics to the other. The French translation comes with a foreword by Maboula Soumahoro, who also translated the work of Hartman into French.

« Quelle que soit la formulation, la question demeure: ce retour est-il possible ? Si la réponse est oui, une nouvelle question se pose immédiatement: de quelle(s) façon(s) ?

Dans tous les cas, il faudra reprendre la mer pour retrouver la mère.

L’ouvrage de Saidiya Hartman se fonde sur une quête. La réponse se trouve au bout du chemin, inévitablement au bout du petit matin. Mais la route est longue, ses embranchements sans fin.

Les conversations panafricanistes sont difficiles de facto, car y prennent part le continent africain et sa diaspora. L’un et l’autre sont séparés par l’histoire, l’océan, la douleur et l’arrachement. Qui a raison? Quelle voix doit prévaloir? Le continent et sa si grande diversité? La diaspora et sa multitude? Est-ce que le premier peut écouter et entendre la seconde? La seconde peut-elle écouter et entendre ce que le premier a à partager de sa propre expérience? Seule l’écoute mutuelle sera féconde. Sans elle, nulle avancée ne sera jamais possible, ni pour l’un ni pour l’autre. Ton pied, mon pied. On est ensemble. Ou on meurt ensemble. Tout est affaire de choix. »

Translation:

“Whatever the wording, the question remains: is this return possible? If the answer is yes, a new question immediately arises: How?

In any case, it will be necessary to set sail again to find the Mother. Saidiya Hartman’s book is based on a quest. The answer lies at the end of the road and inevitably once morning has broken. But the road is long, with endless forks.

Pan-Africanist conversations are de facto difficult because they involve the African continent and its diaspora. Both are separated by history, the ocean, pain and uprooting. Who is right? Which voice should take precedence? The continent and its great diversity?

The diaspora and its multitude? Can the former listen and hear the latter? Can the latter listen and hear what the former has to share from their own experience? Only listening to one another will be fruitful.

Without it, no progress will ever be possible, neither for the one nor for the other. Your foot, my foot. We are together, or we die together.

It’s all a matter of choice."

*—Saidiya Hartman, À perte de mère – Sur les routes atlantiques de l’esclavage, French translation and foreword by Maboula Soumahoro, Paris, Brook, 2023

Recorded in Les Lilas, France

Original languages of contribution: English, French

Message 4: Dorota Gawęda & Eglė Kulbokaitė

For our contribution, we would like to submit a short extract from our performance piece BROOD. In this part, a singer performs multiple voices of the polyphonic Lithuanian song Rūta Tūta in the tradition of Sutartinės. This Lithuanian multi-part singing tradition is most often performed by women. The selected song uses the rue plant (rūta) as personification for female experience and focuses on women’s connection to land through work.

Tūta, tūtela,

Tūta, tūta.

Mes dvi sesiulas,

Tūta, tūta.

Tūta, tūtela,

Tūta, tūta.

Žalioj lunkelaj,

Tūta, tūta.

Tūta, tūtela,

Tūta, tūta.

Šienelį grėbjam,

Tūta, tūta.

Translation:

Tūta, tūtela,

Tūta, tūta.

Us two sisters,

Tūta, tūta.

Tūta, tūtela,

Tūta, tūta.

In a green meadow,

Tūta, tūta.

Tūta, tūtela,

Tūta, tūta.

We’ve been raking the hay,

Tūta, tūta.

Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė, BROOD (Scene 3, audio extract), 2023

Original music: OXHY

Sound design: Haraldur Thrastarson

Voice: Justyna Chaberek

Recorded in Berlin, Germany

Message 3: Yana Bachynska

To be together, we need to listen. We need to be attentive, to put ourselves in another’s shoes. Being together means considering the experience of others. It’s almost an impossible task because understanding comes from shared experience, and if that’s absent, we have to engage our imagination—much of it—to be together.Most interpersonal conflicts arise from misunderstanding, from not knowing or [not] recognizing another’s experience. Understanding the reasons behind things allows us to calm down and accept the differences of others. This approach not only strengthens our bonds with others but also with ourselves. It helps us forgive ourselves, love ourselves, and, in turn, love others. This mindset is applicable everywhere, except in the face of physical aggression. With that, it’s different. Trying to understand the reasons for physical violence only destroys you, turning you into an aggressor yourself. You can turn the other cheek to a slap, but not to a knife or a bullet.

These gunshots I recorded a few days ago. These sounds I hear almost every day. They serve as a reminder of death, violent death, and of those with whom it’s impossible to reason. They also bring me closer to those I struggle to understand — those who don’t want to kill or harm me, but whom I still find hard to grasp. Through these sounds, I feel a duty to love others, a duty to imagine and understand them.

Recorded in Lviv, Ukraine

Original language of the contribution: English

Message 1: Tatiana Fiodorova-Lefter

When spring comes, when nature begins to awaken, I already find myself thinking about the nettles! I wonder where to look for nettles. The time window for cooking my favorite dish is only a few weeks. Therefore, we shall not miss the moment to symbolically welcome spring—with a dish of nettles. I grew up in Chișinău, in a city where it wasn’t easy to find nettles. In my early childhood, every year with the first arrival of spring, my mother and I searched for these herbs. We would pick them everywhere, as long as it was away from the motorways.

While walking in the park, my mother would often pick nettles, and I would help her. We knew every nook and cranny where nettles could be found, and we were as happy as children every time we found new spots.

As I pluck the nettle leaves, I feel the tingling and pain from the ‘sting’, but the anticipation of spring porridge erases all the inconvenience of collecting the stinging plant.

Once the nettles are collected, I carefully sort them at home, either by myself or with my mother, and only then I start cooking.

I dump a full bag of the succulent, juicy young plant on the table and take a close look at what I’ve managed to collect, removing a blade of grass here or a bit of dirt there.

All this magic takes place in the kitchen while my mother and I talk about her childhood, youth, and married life and singing Ukrainian songs.

Hey lads, unharness your horses

and lie down to sleep

And I will go to the green garden

To dig [a well]...

Our family has been making porridge from young nettles for a long time, ever since my father was still alive. My mum once peeped at how my grandmother, my dad’s mother, cooked it.

Grandma would prepare dishes that we weren’t used to eating at our parents’, in town: nettles, polenta, zeamă soup.

I remember a small round wooden table and all of us. I was always surprised that there was so much room: there was Grandma, Grandpa, Dad, Mom, my sister and me sitting at the table. Everything is round: the table, the plates, the frying pan with the nettle porridge, the hominy cake... Then Grandma would use a thread to cut the polenta and that yellow and soft sun ended up in my hands.

Recorded in Chișinău, Moldova

Original languages of the contribution: Romanian, English, Ukrainian, Russian

Introduction by the Btps collective

Yulia: Hi, this is Yulia, speaking from Boston, Massachusetts. And here it is: the collective Beyond the post-soviet emerged in 2021 out of the need and urge of producing and disseminating knowledge collectively, and to research and reveal interconnectivity of the colonialisms. The collective has its personal connections and understanding of the cultural regions previously referred to as ‘post-soviet space’ and ‘post-socialist countries’ and beyond that. We conceive active and attentive listening as a decolonial practice and as a political position. And through that we acknowledge the fact of not knowing but willing to understand. Each project and meeting is a potential to build relationships, which entails responsibilities.

Each of the projects creates the space for emerging spontaneous collectives or collectivity. Therehow we aim to create the space for discussion and being together.

Tatiana: Hi, I’m Fiodorova-Lefter Tatiana. I’m from Moldova. For our group, it was important to listen to each other and share our experiences. We connected both online and offline, using different messaging apps and video calls. Our work also took us on trips and to meetings. All this brought us even closer, despite the physical distance between us. We understood that—no matter the distance—deep connections, collective work, and friendships are still possible.

Wiola: Hi, this is Wiola speaking from Seyðisfjörður in East of Iceland. After many online meetings during which we were discussing what we as a collective could contribute, we came up with the idea of a sound archive that includes people which we have been working with, have been inspired by or we think their voice should be heard and be present in our archive. We decided to ask them “How to be next to each other?” and they were allowed to express themselves in a way that was honest to them and in the language of their choice—the only limitation was a medium of answer: sound.Danylo: Hi, this is Danylo, speaking from Quimper, Western Brittany in France. We discussed with Anna Zvyaginsteva, a Ukrainian artist working in different mediums, how to present the archive. In terms of subjects, she often gets inspiration from her experience with nature, her memory, and the ideas of life and death. She helped us to develop the concept. Anna gives her perception of this question by creating a bench with the collective, to have the audience be close to each other, to try to construct a sense of acknowledgment and mutual understanding. In an expression of her sight, Anna shared the passage: “Неначе дерево без листя стоїть моя душа в полях” —“Like a tree without leaves my soul stands in fields.”

Sasha: Hi, this is Sasha, speaking from l’Étang de l’Or, in the south of France. On the bench, we are very happy to welcome our colleagues and friends, who are: Epp Annus, a researcher, thinker, and writer based between Estonia and the USA, the collective Bishkek School of Contemporary Art, who work in Kyrgyzstan, a queer artist from Lviv in Ukraine, Yana Bachynska. Then: Zola Chichmintseva-Kondamambou, a cultural worker from France and a member of our collective, the artistic duo Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė, artist and curator from Moldova Tatiana FiodorovaLefter, who is also a member of Btps, philosopher Kristupas Sabolius, based between Lithuania and the USA, a very young 7-year old lady from Ukraine Anastasiia, artist and poet Araks Sahakyan, and finally, Edita Stejskalová, a Roma activist from Czechia.

Please, be welcome in this space!

Yulia Fisch, cultural worker

Recorded in Boston, USA

Tatiana Fiodorova-Lefter, artist and curator

Recorded in Chișinău, Moldova

Wiola Ujazdowska, artist

Recorded in Seyðisfjörður, Iceland

Danylo Boiko, cultural worker

Recorded in Quimper, France

Sasha Baydal, interdependent art worker

Recorded on l’Étang de l’Or, France