Honorary Mention
sonyaisupova.com/The-Satelitte
The project explores the relationship between humans and machines, the map maker, and the map, looking closely at the remote-sensing infrastructures, and their problematics as well as questioning maps and mapping processes to detect changes in the landscape that are occurring daily due to the ongoing Russian war in Ukraine. Transforming satellite images into maps of the territory.
Photo: Guillaume Collignon
Photo: Guillaume Collignon
Photo: Guillaume Collignon
Photo: Guillaume Collignon
The machine that Isupova has built is a metaphorical satellite hovering above the land, mapping the data with a limited amount of accuracy. The images that the machine is producing come straight from the commercial crop monitoring satellite called EOS SAT. Translating this information into colors, my machine can draw landscapes: it can show me trees, fields, and hedges. It can show me life and growth, recovery, and renewal. The project aims to explore the ecological consequences of the ongoing Russian war in Ukraine and its impact on the landscape. It particularly focuses on key events of the war, such as the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam on June 6, 2023, in Southern Ukraine, and the first Russian offensive into Kyiv on March 23, 2022. Collaborating with ecologists and earth scientists, an extensive series of maps has been created to track vegetation level changes surrounding these events.
Mapping Uncertain Landscape: The Satellite serves as a means for us to bear witness—an arduous task carried out by Ukrainians on a daily basis. The notion that something traumatic requires witnessing, seeing, and hearing forms a cornerstone of journalism. This responsibility has now extended to artists, designers, and cultural workers in Ukraine. Maps and mapping serve as a means for us, as artists and designers, to continue this work of bearing witness to the brutality of war, even if unsuccessfully.
Credits
The project was developed as a diploma project for the Department of Space and Communication at HEAD Geneva
Tutor: Dominic Robson
Music: Aleyna Günay
Special thanks: Frédéric Butor-Blamont, Hsuan Lee, Emile Demerliac, Joseph Popper,
Arno Mathies, Rosario Hurtado
With support from: HEAD Geneva, Kyiv Emergency Art Platform, EOS Data Analytics Academic Outreach Program
Biography
Sofia Isupova (UA) is a Ukrainian visual artist and designer based in Geneva. She earned her bachelor’s degree from the Estonian Academy of Arts and her master’s degree in the Space and Communication program at HEAD, Geneva. She develops machines centered around maps and mapmaking processes. Through her work, she explores the complex relationship between humans and machines, remote sensing infrastructures, and their inherent limitations. Isupova’s inquiry into the processes of mapping seeks to detect changes in the landscape that occur daily due to the ongoing war in Ukraine. Recently, she won the Nestlé Jeune Création Prize 2023 and was a finalist for the Croix-Rouge Geneva Art Humanity Prize 2023.
Jury Statement
It matters what is mapped, how it is mapped, and why. While the majority of satellite and environmental data is today used for remote land use and governance, here the artist explores the opposite—placing herself into the unaccusable land devastated by war. Mapping Uncertain Landscape: The Satellite is critical cartographic work, directing its gaze to the land change caused by war, documenting changes in forests, fields, cities, and infrastructures in a way they matter to the artist as an affected individual. Such critical cartographic practice helps individuals as well as whole displaced communities to deal with ongoing trauma, while also remembering and healing their relation to the land. Satellite technologies here become an infrastructure of care, and not of power, demonstrating the societal relevance of earth observation science and technologies.