History.

The history of the delta begins in 1735, when Tatiana Fedorovna Pronchischeva (incorrectly previously named Maria Pronchischeva; her maiden name was Kondyreva, the first female polar explorer of the Arctic) together with explorer Vasily Pronchischev made a journey to the Lena Delta in the Great Northern Expedition, in the Lena-Yenisei detachment, with the aim of charting the eastern borders of the Empire and describing the Arctic borders of Siberia. The expedition made a major contribution to the study of the Taimyr, and a map of the position of the mouth of the Lena was created. The voyage ended in the death of the pair. There is now a polar research station in the Delta. Having learned of this, we decided to pull off a symbolic re-combination. By trespassing into the fabric of history, we can simultaneously continue and alter the course of the research by reopening the work of memory, using the construction of fiction and all kinds of writing. As partners in artistic projects, we superimpose and reproduce our own memory and personal mythology on the myth of place discovery, generating multiple artistic objects and placing them in a digital environment, opening the way to new knowledge about the world and production and resisting the violence of a system of achievement and conquest. We expect that the resulting hybrid of multiple technical and semantic layers in this co-location will be a map-model for the possible existence of various agents and actors of writing and modes of human interaction in our times. The aim of the Pronchischevs' expedition was to map the borders of the empire, trying to fix them and describe them. In fact, this desire for efficiency, for quantification, is also embedded in modern systems of data collection and processing, where everything is subject to measurement. The desire for total efficiency which degenerated into a perverted form of labour camps resulted in the deportation of Lithuanians, Estonians and Finns mobilised for fish harvesting from 1942 to 1947; the absolute majority died in unbearable conditions. These camps could be seen as a way of excluding the human being, of taking him out of the social field. Death is the last frontier and the last master of all colonial intentions, and for us the trip to this place is also an opportunity, using project methods of graphic languages, to describe and investigate this space, to build communicative structures on this material, to put them on a virtual map and through them to try to think about what the border and the limit are in social and political systems. We think of the continuous border as a dispersed, permeable multitude, and we see the project as an attempt to make sense of the systemic holes in the symbolic resulting from the weakness of man-made and proper human impulse in colliding with the Real Life as the non-human and exuberant nature of the Delta.

Project.

Mythologised and creative topography will be the main tool of the work. The map itself is a demonstration of passages near the void, walking around the Nothing, around a hole. around some place on the map, and purely empirically the Nothing depends on the solid presence of something to make its emergence possible; the mapping of singularities takes into account the necessity of acknowledging different entities, but also considers their potential aspirations for invisibility and rejection. As we conceive it, the project will be built as a game space map, with situated objects of artistic, literary and research creativity and interest. The artist Kirill Makarov is creating an exact map of the estuary in 3d format, to be placed in the digital space himself, as there are no accurate satellite images of the region that can be copied into the game system. This gap in symbolism prompted him to invent and visualise the fictional part of the delta in the game engine space. The question of a place's own mythology is addressed by psychoanalyst, poet and independent researcher Ksenia Kononenko. Mythology, as an idea of existence, of solutions that are not enough but could be possible, is realized in the project through different methods of poetic, artistic and research writing which are questioned because they are placed in a digital environment and lose the property of live speech, they pass into becoming "written" and therefore are recorded as knowledge. The project will work with different formats of writing such as travel and research diaries, poetry, fiction and auto-fiction essays and blank interviews that will accompany and weave into the map of the game space as actors in their own right. Gilles Deleuze said that "...the ultimate aim of literature is the creation of a certain health or the invention of a certain people, that is, some possibility of life. To write for the sake of this people, which is lacking... ('for the sake of' means here not so much 'in place of' as 'for')". What stories already exist? What could have happened? What lives around the empty dots how do we let it happen? The delta abounds in lakes as gouged out dots, and this leads artists to the decision to create a new space, making sense of its topology, creating multiple fictional objects, exploring its effects and consequences of colliding with a world in which there is in reality an empty point which is not part of any subset, and which is simultaneously the death of line and aggregate, representing the absence of pre-ordained knowledge and knowledge of technology, opening the way to the personal. We are interested in the mythology of possible existences expressed in a mythologised map-game. We are going to comprehend the artefacts of death, emptiness and possibility in the thick of the Real.