Inspired by a creative community at an Odesa shipyard, “Heating Season” explores the intersection of organic and mechanical solidarities, and the semantic connections between industrial systems and the natural environment. The repetitive ‘tracing’ of the rusted nails, recovered from the artist’s studio as “traceogram,” demonstrates the gradient of the gestures of the found objects’ movement. As the nails make their way across the paper, programmed social behaviors start to appear, referencing Madeleine Akrish’s ideal laboratory observation, which describes “sociality” in terms of “scripts or situations” for creating connections between human or non-human actors.
Jury Statement
The nails collected from the ashes in the stove in the author’s workshop become a material witness to the winter of 2022-2023. The “tracegraph” created for the project, consisting of a system of moving magnets that sets in motion a mass of nails on the surface of the tablet, leaves mechanical traces of friction and incomplete combustion products on interchangeable sheets of paper.
The kinetic installation recreates Madeleine Akrich’s ideal laboratory observation, which proposes to describe sociality in terms of scripts or situations of creating connections between human or non-human actors. The concept of a script is synonymous with the language of programming, where words in the code are simultaneously actions.
As in the case of sociological and anthropological methods of studying this process, the observer of the installation can only see the factors of change and their stage results. As Bruno Latour asked: Do things act on the same level as people?
Photos: Ivan Strahov
Photos: Ivan Strahov
Credits
Project Curator: Cyrill Lipatov / Technical Curator: Roman Klymenko, Coszhey Lab
The project was created under the program of the European Union EU4Culture and Goethe-Institut Ukraine.
Program’s applicators: NGO Museum For Change, Odesa; NGO Asortymentna Kimnata; Ivano-Frankivsk.
The presentation of the work is funded by State of the ART(ist), a collaboration between the Austrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ars Electronica.
Vasya Dmytryk
Vasya Dmytryk was born 1991 in Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine and lives and works in Odesa, Ukraine. His artistic practice has four main directions: kinetic sculpture, found objects, spatial installation, and landscape sculpture. Dmytryk finds connections between different materials and their environment of origin and collects assemblages from them that form new semantic contexts and environmental relations.
