LINA Fellows x Forecast: Valeria Prorizna

In the personal archive of a technician who worked at an early experimental electronic music workshop in Kyiv, operational from the mid-1960s and dissolved in the 1970s, a collection of recordings has survived. Select fragments will direct a hauntological sonic walk through a city where visions of the future are manifested in conflicting forms.

Moving through West End, the listeners will find themselves in spaces that fulfill the visionary promise, expressed in the workshop’s output, but will also pass though environments no one in the postwar decades would have anticipated or wanted. The utopian sonic material, created by those who believed that the 21st century would be different from the 20th, should have been a soundtrack for an urban life to come. Having reached the future for which the soundtrack was written, the flaneurs can contemplate the form it took.

Workshop by Valeria Prorizna with a score by Timur Dzhafarov
Sonic Walk: Certain Fragments from a Strumotone Inquiry
Sunday, 25 January
1:00 to 2:00 pm
Meeting point: Messe Nord ZOB
Followed by a joint return trip to Radialsystem

Free admission. Registration is required.

After the workshop, there will be the opportunity to attend the performance The Larva by Forecast mentee María Gabriela Rubio Hernández.

Valeria Prorizna is a Ukrainian filmmaker and visual artist, developing counter-archives of spatial justice and suppressed histories. Drawing on media archaeology, she works across cinema, video installation, and spatial research. Since 2022, she has been collaborating with the Centre for Spatial Technologies, contributing to projects including “City Within a Building”, “Nebelivka Hypothesis”, the “Mariupol Drama Theatre Spatial Archive”, presented at Venice Biennale Architettura 2023, and more recently “Church, Chora, Chersonese”. Her work has been exhibited at Akademie der Künste Berlin, M HKA Antwerp and others, receiving a Prix Ars Electronica Honorary Mention. Valeria lives and works between the Netherlands and Ukraine.

Timur Dzhafarov is a Ukrainian electronic musician and a soldier in the Armed Forces of Ukraine, currently living and working in Kyiv. Before Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, he produced experimental electronic music under the name John Object, performing at festivals and music events across Ukraine and Europe.