Not a Map, but a Trace: On Landscapes and Colonial Imagery

Landscapes are never neutral: the way land is represented is always a political statement translated into the language of aesthetics. Being sensitive to historical wounds, indigenous and decolonial filmmakers have long been aware of the importance of the images of land – stolen, damaged, and inscribed with colonialism through the imposed borders. Yet, for places that were once (or are still) colonies of Russia and the Soviet Union, this discourse barely exists in the public sphere, and their histories are still rarely acknowledged as the histories of colonisation.

The lack of decolonial discourse serves as one of the driving forces for the program Not a Map, but a Trace, which consists of the in-cinema screenings at Eye Filmmuseum, an exhibition at MACA, and an online programme on the Eye Film Player. The selected films explore the material earth as the most explicit witness of colonial violence. In particular, they explore damaged landscapes as sites of historical memory, borderlands as places of rupture, and roads as spatial connectors. By paying attention to these images of land, the program counteracts the imperial practice of cinematic mapping: in the same way as French and British empires, the Russian and Soviet states were commissioning films from the ‘exotic’ distant corners of the empire to control them. The program Not a Map, but a Trace re-appropriates the process of cinematic mapping to trace alternative geographies of countries and places previously dominated by Soviet power.

Moving through space

The programme revolves around two key images: a damaged landscape and a (rail)road – a static and a mobile way of exploring space in cinema. The image of the ruin from Olena Newkryta’s experimental film Ruins in Reverse (2021) gives the main trajectory for the program. It studies the ruins of the standardised Soviet apartment block appearing in the steppe landscape in the south of Ukraine. This familiar image referring to Soviet history, reveals that material spaces are the witnesses of the historical traumas. Newkryta’s film does not imply that such ruins are the symbols of nostalgia, as they are in a lot of art dealing with post-socialist architecture. Rather, in the film, the ruins acquire a generative potential to work through the traumatic past and form a future.

The second leading motif is that of a railway that drives the exhibition at MACA. The central piece, Tekla Aslanishvili’s film installation A State in a State (2022), portrays the disruption of the railroad infrastructure in Caucasus. Through the encounter with a railroad worker, audiences are told the stories of spatial damage, fragmentation, and failed connectivity. This brings the film in conversation with the general programme’s motif of the landscapes wounded by imperial infrastructures. Aslanishvili’s film is put in dialogue with the installation based on classic Soviet propaganda film Turksib (Viktor Turin, 1929). This installation invites questioning of the railroad infrastructures which were colonial enterprises in the past: Turin’s film tells the story of the conquest of the Central Asian land with railways, representing the ‘progress’.

Weaving a net

What should we do with this visual legacy when this imperial fantasy turns into real violence and war? What kinds of films can challenge imperial imagery? The first step in this program is to look at what we are left with: – at the damaged landscapes that are no longer the imaginary dwellings for a happy socialist society, but the silent testimonies to the repressive histories. Beyond the disrupted roads, the motif of damage finds its aesthetic shape in the depiction of fragile borders in Letters to Max (Eric Baudelaire, 2014) and Extinction (Salomé Lamas, 2018), abandoned landscapes in Georgica (Sulev Keedus, 1998) and Moscow Time, military conflicts in The Lighthouse (Marya Saakyan, 2006) and Volcano (Roman Bondarchuk, 2018), and, more abstractly, in the aesthetics of alienation common to many showcased films.

Making a programme exposing Soviet colonialism requires navigating the complex path of thought where every wrong move risks descending into an authoritarian utopia. The program seeks to expose the violence inherent in such utopias, highlighting the failure of socialist dreams manifested in border conflicts. The motif of utopia remains in images of the futuristic constructions and infrastructural dreams: it becomes an aesthetic strategy to process the forward-looking communist ideology and open alternative futures. Thus, State in a State is not about post-Soviet infrastructure, it is about infrastructure that connects Caucasus with Turkey and Europe - it goes beyond and creates new mental connectivities.

Even if this programme could be understood in terms of geography, it should be a heterogeneous geography that paves the way beyond the notion of the post-Soviet and allows this space to weave different paths of relationality with other places, starting with Amsterdam. Is there room for a utopia and nuance in times of war? Perhaps not. Still, for those living in the safety of European cities, it is of crucial importance to reflect on the underlying causes of war and violence.

The aim of this program is not to create a map – that is an impossible task unless we retreat to the familiar totalizing visions. Rather, the aim is to weave a net - to trace the line that comes from one node to another, where Amsterdam is also one of the intersections.

About Kseniia Bespalova

Kseniia Bespalova is an independent film researcher and a Programmer of the Future at Eye Filmmuseum, Amsterdam. Her current programming and research project ties together the cinematic representation of landscapes, resource extraction, and colonialism. Kseniia collaborates with Amsterdam-based art and research collective Fuck Healing (?) and is a part of the pre-selection team for the European Shorts section of Sarajevo Film Festival. Her interests include decolonial cinema from ex-Soviet states, environmental cinema, and the notions of land, border, and cosmopolitics. She graduated Cum Laude from the rMA programme in Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam.