Yuri Yefanov

Yuri Yefanov’s work I Watched the Sinusoidal Motion of Blue Electronic Waves until I Sensed Their Smell is a public space project that brings back memories of inaccessible places in Ukraine and provides an opportunity to create alternative scenarios for the present and the future.

This work reproduces a digital simulation of the environment in real time. Based on the artist’s memories, it recreates the currently inaccessible area in his native Gurzuf in Crimea. The landscape located on the territory of the Artek summer camp, which Russia uses for ideological education, following in the USSR’s footsteps, is now closed to visitors. However, in the work, you can see a diving championship, which Yefanov is planning to organize there when he returns. Characters controlled by artificial intelligence have fun and use specific port architecture for water games. The artist recalls that only in Crimea did he observe such unusual jumps into water, where each had its own name and was accompanied by a lot of splashes.

Anticipating the erasure of memory about inaccessible locations in Ukraine, Yefanov transports them into his own model of public space. This approach is based on Michel Foucault’s ‘heterotopia’ concept, which marks real places that ‘fall out’ of the usual order, because the rules of their existence, functioning, and flow of time are majorly different. The idealistic, yet quite realistic, scenario of the work is fighting reality and struggles with the policy of forgetting and disintegration pursued by Russia. The improvised championship free of all hierarchies becomes a counterpoint to the violence inflicted upon the landscape by the aggressor.