Writer Asia Bazdyrieva explores what happens when complex environments are flattened through technical and epistemic mediation. Her column Oscillations is inspired by her unvarnished, poetic missives shared during the 2022 invasion of Ukraine; in it, she reflects on witnessing and writing that resist a global spatial order that enables slow violence and environmental destruction.
"To break a habit," — says S. to me over a video call, — "one must understand what constitutes a reward. And then to reconfigure it, to find another form for it. It is a mechanical process."
It is the first time that we speak, yet I am unmediated. Some time ago I exposed myself to the pluriverse of eyes that were entering my immediate reality through the proliferation of screens. It was the rawness of my voice, I was told, that broke through the hum of information. To find words for the rupture, to avoid the reduction of it to a message was exactly my point.
Back in 2022, I was in a place which, at any moment, might no longer exist. Between the newly published Bloomberg reports in November 2021, suggesting that Russia is planning the invasion of Ukraine from the east, north, and south — and the actual invasion on February 24th in 2022, I had three months to process this fact and reflect on my feelings, which I then thought of as preemptive grief. What preoccupied me most, though, was language. What was coming was big and previously unknown. Yet I learned from my past experiences, witnessing two revolutions and the beginning of the war in 2014, that when the unnamed remains unnamed — or worse, when unnamed is named falsely — my reality is progressively taken over by distortions, reductions and inversions.
When the unnamed remains unnamed — or worse, when unnamed is named falsely — my reality is progressively taken over by distortions, reductions and inversions.
The visceral intensity of the first moments of the attack felt like a sudden estrangement of names and meanings from their objects. On Day 7 I wrote:
“I could no longer talk, I simply howled. Not wept, but howled like an animal. There was a rupture between the world and reality, and I was thrown on this side.”
Now, almost three years later, S. and I are talking about the choice of a form. We are both drawn to the intimacy that the genre of diary affords. Yet, again, I seek to articulate something more that there is in that space. This articulation feels crucial. As if the demarcation of that space opens up a possibility to exist, and to relate, and to claim what is otherwise taken away from me — and from all of us before we know it.
Revolutions, wars and other ruptures in the seemingly settled order of things are demarcators of spaces and times. They are territorial and as such, subjected to geopolitical modes of communication.
Revolutions, wars and other ruptures in the seemingly settled order of things (falling in love, I could argue, is one of them, albeit on a scale of one) are demarcators of spaces and times. They are territorial and as such, subjected to geopolitical modes of communication. This subjection is inherently violent, as it flattens living assemblages and myriad experiences that resist the logic of a map. Against this logic comes my howl, which, as my friend and media theorist Olexii Kuchanskyi wrote later, “is something bigger than ‘I’,” — a separate personality with its own experiences.1
I take stock of my methods:
iterations
paranoia as a form of love
building my language with rocks
interlocutors
entropy
over-explaining
An antagonism of its own, I thought:
I am not what you are and this is why I write this,
I am what you are and this is why I write this.
Bio
Asia Bazdyrieva is a scholar and writer with a background in art history and analytical chemistry.Her main interest is in the relationship between natural sciences and their seemingly neutral techniques, and the production of imaginaries that span social strata, while shaping politics and poetics of the earth. In 2018-2022, she co-authored ‘Geocinema’ — a collaborative project exploring the infrastructures for earth observation as co-producing forms of cinema. Bazdyrieva was a Fulbright scholar in 2015-2017 at The City University of New York, and Digital Earth fellow in 2018-2019; she was also a research fellow at the Bauhaus University Weimar. She is currently pursuing her PhD at The University of Applied Arts Vienna, and serves as an advisor in the Advisory Board of the transmediale festival in Berlin.
Notes
1 Olexii Kuchanskyi, “Digital Leviathan and His Nuclear Tail: Notes on Body and the Earth in the State of War,” e-flix Notes, April 18, 2022, [online]