M HKA Ensembles

Video, 00:04:14.

Collection: Courtesy of the Artist.

Oleksandr Burlaka travels through the steppes of South Eastern Ukraine, which was known before the industrialisation of the region as the Wild Field. In the XVIII century a period of transformation of these areas into a large industrial region started.

To form a route, Oleksandr turned to field maps of the 16-th century which were commissioned by the Tsar of Moskovia Ivan IV the Terrible. The Book of the Great Drawing is a later textual description of this lost map.

The historical stratification of the network of trade and military roads would later become the core of the urbanisation of the region and the scheme for the coal mining industry. All the routes described in the book are leading from the Crimean Peninsula towards the North.

The book contains descriptions of various territories, rivers and roads that interested the Moscow state of that time. The artist works with descriptions of the Muravsky and Izyumsky ways. Following the found texts, and mapping the landscapes with the help of video he creates a situation of simultaneous existence of narratives of the past-present-future.

The video combines different angles of observation of the environment: the perspectives of a human and that of a drone moving over landscapes.

Created during the residency Landscape as a Monument by IZOLYATSIA.

Music: SELERA, 2022

Editing, subtitles: Lera Guevska