Kurgans, Tombs and Us

Kurgans, Tombs and Us is a three-part video installation that tells the story of a field trip to the kurgans of the Dnipro region, that took place in December 2024. I worked on the sound for the piece.

For many of Ukrainians, kurgans were a familiar landscape element, as well as an important cultural symbol. A lot of the mounds are protected archeological sights where historians and archeologists found crucial artefacts that shed light on ancient burial traditions.

Many of them became inaccessible due to the russian invasion of Ukraine — they are either occupied, heavily shelled, damaged or used by the army for military purposes. The only way to see them is from the satellite images, but the image quality often does not allow to evaluate the state of the sights.

Recognizing the value of our spaces of memory — to which it is essential to return in any way possible, as they hold a connection to the land, our ancestors and history — we went to the hard to reach mounds of the Dnipro region to conduct field research around them: moving between memories, passed-down myths, imaginaries, and the reality of walking through the winter fields, finding trenches, flowers, missile parts, mimicking Scythian rituals and lying in the eye of a volcano.

A mystical experience of being around the circle, around the space, around the void, and the equation of the plane.

While working on the sound for the video, I made field recordings of the kurgans in the Dnipro region, 50 km from the current frontline, using various microphones, including a Geofon to capture the low-frequency tension that this place holds. I also experimented with different approaches, including modular synthesis and custom instrument-making, to explore corporeal textures that could translate the experience we had during the field trip.

The song “Zhyto” is inspired by zhnyvarski pisni, a crucial part of the ancient harvest rituals associated with gathering crops and marking the completion of the cycle. Traditionally, harvest songs were performed mostly by women’s groups or solo singers, in unison and without instrumental accompaniment. My intention was to write a song that could bridge ancestral traditions, which are becoming increasingly difficult to preserve due to ongoing societal catastrophes.

The work is comprised of videos, field recordings, 3D scans of the locations in a virtual environment, analog photos, found objects, poetry and pottery.