In Oscillations, art historian, writer and researcher Asia Bazdyrieva explores what happens when both place and people are rendered as components of material exchange. In this unadorned, semi-fictional text, she considers the distance between topographical and topological readings of space.
— Wrap your arms around him, here, so that one palm is at the bottom of his belly, just below his navel, and the other one is on the back of his waist. Now, can you feel it? It's like there is a gyroscope inside. That’s the center of gravity. Try guiding it with your hands, and notice how your body moves behind it. See, it is as if he swallowed a ball. But it is your ball, and you are to play with it anyway.
There were hardly any people left in the village. Five years ago, the records say, there were 823 people living here. In reality, more and more of them were elderly, and, after the local paramedic station was permanently closed because of the medical reform, there were even fewer left. Once it was a large settlement of Podolians and Moldovans who migrated south. But then they gradually resettled, or were displaced to Donbas and other southeastern regions to work in heavy industry.
We walked from the nearest railroad station. At 5.18 a.m., the rumble of the electric train was the last reminder of a familiar world drifting away somewhere into the darkness. There was almost no road, but the route was familiar and, according to some internal decision, safe. In three hours we reached the place.
We went to an old hut, not far from the postal station, where no letters had been sent for a long time. It had once been occupied by an acquaintance of mine. He wasn't from around here, but he had come from the west many years ago to rescue dogs — that's what he called it. In the village, where no one cared about anyone anymore, he fed strays, and took the most hopeless of them to his hut and nursed them back to health. One of them, a short black mongrel named Little, stayed with him for good. He found her in Chișinău, shortly before she was to be euthanised, and kept her.
In front of the house was a large and neglected yard, in the depths of which were clustered railway sleepers — in warm weather they were occupied by cats. The last time we saw each other was in 2014. That day, we brought a table out into the yard and set it up for dinner with friends. Someone snapped a photo that made everyone look smudged but happy. And then we lost contact. I haven't been back here since.
The place was completely empty now. The house was boarded up.
— What do we do now?
— If we head south, it will take us another three hours to reach the water. We will stop there.
The tent was pitched right by the sea. Above the shore rose a small cliff with an almost dried-up grove of acacia bushes, which protected us from the wind. It was already the end of the season: the sun was blazing only from eleven to two, and then the heat stayed in the air for a while longer. We knew that by dusk we would have to return to the tent and dress more warmly.
The coast soon became familiar. There were bunches of dried steppe flowers lying along it, pressed down by a rock or a plastic bottle filled with sand. They were marks left by invisible fishermen against their nets. I went from one to the next, and then to the next one, and so on, so that the walk itself — always starting without a goal — took on a mathematical rhythm.
The shoreline changed every day, though. On the first morning, the water came close to the cliff, the wet sand was strewn with crabs carried by the restless sea. The next day the sky was clear, the sea calm, and the water receded, revealing the shore. On the third day, still at a distance and in sunny weather, the waves rose; it was impossible to enter the water because of the hordes of jellyfish that had piled up. This landscape is millions of years old, but its unbreakable truth is that nothing repeats itself, and nothing returns.
This landscape is millions of years old, but its unbreakable truth is that nothing repeats itself, and nothing returns.
The question was asked:
What is the difference between topographic and topological space?
The former consists of points separated by distance. They are located and defined by it. Here, the top of a mountain will always be high above the sea level.
The latter knows time, but does not know distances. All its points are a field of possibilities. Anything at any moment becomes the underside of itself. In the cross-section of millions of years, the top of the mountain is the sea.
I enter these spaces through doors with other doors left open behind them again, and again, and I don't know where it leads. The space stretches, twists, collapses and finds itself on the other side of itself, like a Möbius strip. Poetry captures this curve. It demands precision.
What is written is defined by distance, but what is in the writing is an infinite field of possibilities:
Everything repeats itself and everything returns,
for we keep walking the same routes, but from the other side.
Odesa and Kyïv, 2021
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.