Anastasia Nefedova's " Tales Heard in the Chronicles of Light when Transmissions Whispered Our Stories" was presented before live audience at Centrale Fies, Dro, Italy on August 1, 2024 as one of 38 AEROPONIC ACTS of CHAMELEON ORBIT curated by Elisa Giuliani & Giulia Crispiani.

Here you will find the documentation of Anastasia Nefedova's presentation as filmed by Baha Görkem Yalım. The written report is by  Bethany Crawford and it includes a summary of the comments by esteemed guest respondents.

Tales Heard in the Chronicles of Light when Transmissions Whispered Our Stories

Anastasia Nefedova's question: What will disappear when we arrive?  

Anastasia's introduction: What if one day familiar methods of sharing and transmitting stories disappear? When a repressive regime turns spoken words into weapons, the need for other forms of communication arise as a means of resistance. Tales of Light tells a story of the future society that developed the system of information transmissions through light and sound codes. This is the story of new forms that are old forms. Chronicles of Cybernetic Whispers explores possible ways of preserving and sharing as a means of resilience. In a time out of joint, what are you gonna do?

Bethany's report: The audience is invited to sit onstage, facing a spotlighted, benched viewing area where performers dressed in black are spaced apart. A camera operator moves among the performers, projecting a live feed onto a screen positioned behind the audience. Throughout the piece, each performer steps up to a microphone to narrate personal memories and experiences from the invasion of Ukraine and the ongoing war. Some stories recount specific events, while others focus on visceral, sensory details—describing what they felt, heard, or smelled in these moments. The live projection underscores the layers of mediation and technological refraction of these deeply intimate memories.  The floating camera man, made distinct from those sharing the recollections by a black t-shirt with “crew” written on the back, circles the narrators, often zooming in on the facial expressions and filming them from below, highlighting themes around framing and the tensions regarding the constructed nature of documenting memory and experiences. At times, the screen shows only the back of a narrator’s head, suggesting the vulnerability of sharing trauma-laden memories while highlighting the tensions in documenting personal experiences. This framing invites reflection on how the “objective” gaze of the camera might both expose and erase the personal, underscoring the fragility of memory in the face of mediated storytelling. The final story that is shared ends with the performer narrating that they are unable to recall, that it was too emotional.

The performance questions the different mode of information processing and communication from the complexity of processing sensorial information and memory making in the context of trauma and war, to how those memories and realities are disseminated, represented and experienced at varying proximities via methods of mediation and technological transmission. Toward the end, Anastasia reads aloud the questions that informed the narratives, then shares the names of the writers and the performers who voiced their stories. This final gesture reveals the extent to which the performance itself enacts questions around mediation and representation.

Antonia Majaca: Antonia starts by answering one of the questions asked by Anastasia “how did you find out about the war in the ukraine?”. She shares a personal note, a friend from her former lives posted something on facebook saying that she had been triggered by the Russian invasion of Ukraine because of their whole generation not treating the PTSD from their own childhood war traumas from the Yugoslav war in the 90s. There was an outpouring of responses to that post, a whole generation of people sharing their emotions and their profound trauma regarding the war. This presentation made her think of that, and she wanted to share her most mediate response to the work.

Antonia continues with a reference to Shoshana Felman’s work on “witnessing” – or the impossibility of witnessing, of turning trauma into narrative particularly when its going on, and its always going on. She talks about stuttering as evidence of the authenticity of the trauma, the impossibility of being able to narrate the trauma. So to represent it like Anatasia has done has been a very brave move. She references the splintering of the voices from the membrane of that memory that is unfolding still as we speak. She comments that the presentation was very special, and thanks Anastasia for sharing it.

Inti Guerrero: Inti appreciated the programming of the day, as was a good continuation of what we just saw and references the previous piece and themes around self-censorship and the fragility of what can be said and framed. He reflects on the position of saying something about current events and when your biography is connected to certain current events, and how then those can be discussed. He says that Anastasia wrote questions that are being asked constantly to people in exile. He says he lives in Berlin now but used to be based in Hong Kong, where there is an exodus of the political context. And now in Berlin there is many people from the cultural exodus from the Moscow cultural scene, and that is very much part of the conversation there now. There was a recent exhibition at HKW that navigated various colonial experiences in Russia to try to understand the wider dimension of imperial-colonial Russian history, Ukraine included but not the only narrative that this exhibition was rooted in. There was contexts of Moldova and the soviet presence there as a think tank to think now of what’s happening in the Ukraine, and the lingering effects in imperialism.

Inti agrees that we need historical distance to unravel the art that is being made but it important to keep making it – so much art done at the time of the trauma. It becomes a moment where in ten years’ time people will remember that their colleague made this work because this was what was happening right now, and he is grateful to Anatasia for opening that up.

Ramon Amaro: Ramon starts by saying that memory work is quite tricky. The reason why its tricky is because our memory is a function on the patterns of our past which collide with the patterns of future and that becomes prediction of patterns of the present and that becomes a prediction of what the future might be. He reflects that we’re almost crystal balls of the past, we bring them into the present and that becomes the basis of that future memory that pushes forward. It’s also why memory is not admissible in most courts of law because all three of the respondents, for example, could witness the same event and all have their own memory of those events, and he really appreciated that performance of that fragmented perspective. Not only just the fragmented perspectives of memory from instances of violence and war but actually the individuals who are preforming those fragments of memory as stand in voices – he questions what does it then mean to give voice to someone’s memory who is in the current process of being rendered voiceless?

Ramon continues that in that basis there is always the question of oral history, which emerges around the globe in its highest concentration when we’re thinking about war and violence and where is the place of that memory especially because you have to assign value to the content  of the utterance itself. All that’s left in those tumultuous experiences is an attempt to capture as much as you can  because the destruction is so devastating that the future is unknown. 

For a lot of people war and violence are theoretical concepts that are at a type of distance but then that actual violence infused in your genes and your culture, it takes on a different type of texture.  The fragments are the continuity in itself, which should be celebrated  - when we think of memory work we always want it to be a continuous memory  as a storytelling moment, when it comes to deep violence it becomes the fragments and the impossibility to tell a story that brings people into connection. He thanks Anatasia for opening that space as something that actually  seems to might have been counterintuitive to do, because she could have told a narrative of a different type of story, she could have let the silence speak for itself – instead Ramon could see her experimentation with different mediums to become the carriers of those different voices and actually retain the responsibility of that voice, not just bodily but cognitively.

About: Anastasia Nefedova

Anastasia Nefedova 's "Tales Heard in the Chronicles of Light when Transmissions Whispered Our Stories" was presented before live audience at Centrale Fies, Dro, Italy on August 1st.

Find the overview of all 38 AEROPONIC ACTS 2024 here: Chameleon Orbit