Art historian, writer and researcher Asia Bazdyrieva explores what happens when both place and people are rendered as components of material exchange. In the fourth instalment of Oscillations, she links somatic transformation to the redrafting of maps — in which, as their coordinates shift, it is harder to locate oneself.
“The map of a country at war is the cartographic uncanny…”1
I recalled that S. wrote this three years ago and I went skimming through all of her dispatches, starting from the first one, to find the phrase. It was in her tenth missive, May 2022; before I reached it, I was reminded viscerally of those immensely dense first weeks of the big invasion — dense in a sense of the physical experience, a compression of space and time that one experiences within the rupture of multiple orders. Back then, one might have been staying still in one place, in a visibly unchanging surrounding; yet despite the sudden and total freeze of everything and everyone, they would have to bear the load of the radical break occurring. The shattered abstractions for some, such as geopolitics, had an immediate corporeal translation to one’s body. You just sat there, amidst the redrawing of the map, both rhetorical and real, and the minimal action, requiring immense labour, was to contain it.
Of course I had other, more pragmatic ways of finding the quote; I could simply ask for it. But I needed time to get slower. I was failing to deliver on time, and I failed to communicate. The past two weeks have been nauseating and reminiscent of 2022, at least in the intensity of the recurring techniques of violence inflicted upon the ‘I’, the one that is “a separate personality with its own experiences.”2 I felt I was a piece of land again; as land, I was partitioned, and I could not separate the part of my sickness that was rational and justifiable, from the one that was untranslatable — that is, elemental and raw. I retreated to containing again, allowing only what was crucial for withstanding the damage. The extreme uncertainty was the least of all: our truth was predictably taken over by distortions, reductions and inversions. To write, as S. also said in 2022, was to claim one’s reality — it was her narrative, and she owned it.
"The order of knowledge is the pursuit of [negotiated] certainty, while the “I” is of matter; it slips past language, it bleeds, it is nauseous, and it is standing on loose ground."
Now I am trying to present my arguments to S., as we meet in Zoom rooms, attending lectures and talks in search of enunciations and reality checks. If, I tell her — as if continuing the conversation of the spring of 2022 — in the heavily mediatised reality of the cyberwar, one’s body and one’s ability of making sense of the experience lived or seen is a battlefield,3 then it is only fair to reveal in writing this body with all its affects, I say. Away from the body, she responds, she had changed her tactics, and wants to make analytical tools only. Theory protects, the “I” exposes, and I agree, while not necessarily choosing only one. The order of knowledge is the pursuit of [negotiated] certainty, while the “I” is of matter; it slips past language, it bleeds, it is nauseous, and it is standing on loose ground.
“The map of a country at war is the cartographic uncanny. The ground moves under our feet and so does our map. It is different every day. One day the map shows more of the free Ukraine, next day it shows less. One day it leads you out of a blockaded city, next day it betrays you and gives you up. All advances and withdrawals of the armed forces cause disorienting folds and twists, so that the subject of the map can find oneself on the opposite side of the border, even while standing still.”4
каждое зло содержит частичную правду, но в искаженной форме
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 Svitlana Matviyenko, Dispatches from the Place of Imminence, Institute of Networked Cultures, [online]
2 Olexii Kuchanskyi, “Digital Leviathan and His Nuclear Tail: Notes on Body and the Earth in the State of War,” 2022, [online]
3 “Cyberwar is a radically invasive and violent event of a high complexity that entangles in the operation of different information systems and cuts across various materialities and flows – from the digital to those of flesh-and-blood.” — Svitlana Matviyenko, “Unmasking Cyberwar,” transmediale (2018), [online]
4 Matviyenko, Ibid