Multimedia,  Poland, Ukraine 2024

Authors: Katarzyna Szyngiera & Zoya Laktionova

Actress: Oksana Cherkashina

Sound: Wojtek Zrałek-Kossakowski

Curators: Liza Stecko / Wojtek Zrałek-Kossakowski

Made with support of  Krytyka Polityczna, Warsaw, Poland

 

     20 Hectares is a multimedia project in which a Polish director Katarzyna Szyngiera and a Ukrainian director Zoya Laktionova raise questions about working with personal and public memory of the totalitarian past. The project is organized in a room where 5 ideas of renovation of the monument-cemetery of Soviet soldiers in the centre of Warsaw were broadcast on TV. We invite the audience to choose the winning project with the help of chestnuts. In Warsaw, for example, most visitors chose the concept n1:

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Occupant Half-Life

 

1. The idea of half-life of the occupier is closely related to the theory of nuclear physics. Compounds of elements that emit radiation and are dangerous have a constant half-life into elements that are no longer dangerous. Inspired by the idea of cleaning up the Chernobyl zone, and the self-renewal of nature there, we propose to leave the territory of the park untouched by man and his ideas. Problems arising in nuclear physics are a typical example of many-body problems. These few bodies of the occupiers, who carried radioactive totalitarian ideas, should lie there for as long as it takes for the idea of totalitarianism to be decomposed into separate components that will no longer be dangerous. At this time, plants, wild animals and wild ideas of peaceful non-aggressive human coexistence should naturally return to the territory of the park.​