I am starting over (yet, not from scratch), outlining a new set of coordinates:

the smell of burned rubber in an U-bahn in a winter cold; a murmur in trembling institutions; an architecture of familiarity; skew lines; the night view; a theory component.

S. and I are now sitting in front of each other and talking about general political frustration. Who chooses to speak, who chooses not to. I say that the crisis that is now revealed is in some ways relieving for me, and for all things that were said before but without an address. Beneath the level of spoken words, though, I feel that we are complicit in something in between the lines. The language of geography does not serve me anymore: spaces are folding. What preoccupies me is to recognise and to weave in such unspoken resonances into what might become. “To be in such an entanglement,”— says N. before I depart for good, — “is the opposite of feeling alone.”

Dear C.,

Time flies, and our little agreement feels so far away now. I was in the process of transitioning from year to year, from place to place, and through a whirlpool of emotions. Here, as promised, a few notes as a follow up to our conversation. (I wish I’d done it sooner, thoughts do evaporate).

I kept coming back to that particular image that I showed you. That one picture indexes two landscapes, which overlap. They contain three modes of functioning: operational, informative, and affective.

The image was produced by Maxar Technologies in the summer of 2022 and has been widely circulated since. It is a satellite view of agricultural fields, northwest of Slovyansk, Ukraine. What is visible to our eyes is the surface that is pierced by artillery shelling. Numerous craters are forming a visual pattern that disrupt the machinic view of what is otherwise read as a uniform landscape. Maxar's WeatherDesk is an on-demand service that employs remote sensing imaging to evaluate the potential harvest of crops in Ukraine. That being said, this picture is strictly operational: it was made to calculate, not to represent.

This picture did slip out of technical reports, nevertheless, and through the information media traveled across news outlets and platforms as a visual index for disruption: A disruption of the environment that stands for the disruption of food supply chains. At that time, it was speculated in the EU, that Ukraine’s affected capacity to produce and export grain puts the food market in Asia-Pacific, sub-Saharan Africa, the Near East and North Africa at the risk of food insecurity that “can lead to further unrest in other parts of the world.”¹ It was also Maxar who had previously released satellite imagery showing Russian ships being loaded in Crimea with grain taken from the occupied areas, and then the pictures of those same ships docked in Syria days later.

The image has since sat on my virtual pinboard board like an open wound. I was so often lost in trying to follow the architectures of labour and infrastructures through which the operations concealed by this image unfold. It took me a long time to realise what was bothering me. What we (a particular we, related to this land) saw in this image was concealed from the view of an outsider. The affective link to the living matter now heavily scarred, that is; our lives disrupted indefinitely. So these are the two registers I was talking about: the first one being calculative and operative, while the other one— geosomatic, relational, non-informatic. The first one is to make things seen and foreseen, while the other one embodies erasure; it references absence.

I know you wanted me to write more on the geosomatic. I am taking this notion from O., who, I think, opened a possible route for me to understand that other form of relation and communication — an affective form of entanglement, one that functions outside of language and image. Something is emerging, yet it needs more time.

Let me get back to it soon.

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.