Lacing Lands: moving in relation, by Kseniia Anokhina
Lacing Lands project by Kseniia Anokhina, Design Art Technology student
Lacing Lands: moving in relation, is an artistic research project, written, narrated, illustrated and coded by Kseniia Anokhina who studies Design Art Technology in Arnhem. It is part of and made in collaboration with ArtEZ Studium Generale for the programme LAND, on ownership, climate breakdown and co-existence.
"We have forgotten about how strongly we are all tied to land, to the resources and space it provides, and how much it influences all the complex workings of our politics and day-to-day lives”, Kseniia writes. In her project, Kseniia explores this idea and the fractured, vast and mediated landscape by crafting intimate spaces that she found herself in across two countries, classrooms, histories, memories, and times. For these stories, she created an audio-visual experience which invites readers to engage with her stories in these different spaces.
We invite you to explore the different layers of the stories and move through these spaces along with Kseniia.
"My name is Kseniia Anokhina. I’m 20 years old, I am a third-year student of the Art, Design & Technology department in Arnhem, and have just finished my internship at ArtEZ Studium Generale.
I am from Moscow, and I currently live on a hill. I don’t exactly know who I am — designer, writer, illustrator, researcher, programmer— and I don’t think I should. But I know that moving lands has affected my perspective greatly, I know that existing in between fields of art and technology allows me to get into places I wouldn’t get to otherwise and I know that sometimes I don’t want to go out, because I dread biking back up the hill.
This patchwork brings together my accounts of day-to-day experiences and how they inform, evoke and necessitate my politics. Answering the phone on a hotline for protestors during unrest in Russia for 12 hours straight, going to open mines at the Hambach Forest with my class, where people were protesting the destruction of the forest while huge pointless machines roar in the background and then reading Bruno Latour on Critical Zones for Honours Program on the way back on a shaking bus: all of these experiences are ways to experience land and various impacts of various policies, weaving a huge never-ending pattern.
This project laces together how I position myself, and hopefully, a route to helping you to position yourself, too.
You can visit the website and follow different routes. Listen to some of the spaces I found myself in and maybe see how our urgencies overlap, read a short interview tied together with a collection of various advocacy work examples and theories, and talk about them.
For the best experience, please open the website on your desktop and use Chrome or Tor Browser.
Please note: This project is not over.
ArtEZ Studium Generale curates and organises gatherings, talks, training courses, podcasts and publications about the state of the arts and its relation to today’s challenges, ranging from immediate societal issues to bold abstract concepts.