It’s very nice to see Bernd Herzogenrath’s Spectral Futures anthology in print. Bernd managed to squeeze such a weird and wonderful mix of futuristic fabulations (that are colorful in every respect including type-face) from an entourage of luminaries like Claire Colebrook, Orit Halpern, Bron Szerszynski, and some 20 other authors.
It was a joy to work with Asia Bazdyrieva and Svitlana Matviyenko on a co-authored chapter entitled “Spectres of Solar Futurity,” that ranges across the wild fields and black soils of past and future Ukraine. Here are a few teaser paragraphs from our piece (broken into shorter bits for readability):
To gauge what futures might be envisioned in and on the sun’s yellow rays, we trace the movement of the sun’s white light, perceived as yellow, into the black earth of Ukraine, and back again to the yellow of that country’s possible futures. We do so through a historical detour in which Russian imperial science, and later Soviet science, contribute to making the earth what it has become for Ukraine: foundational, contested, coveted, resourcified, resistant.
Unlike the Russian and Soviet scientists who perceived the earth as resource, and specifically as “Russian chernozem,” Ukrainian artists, from Pavlo Tychyna (quoted above) and Oleksandr Dovzhenko to Fedir Tetianych, perceived it as poetry, as music, as clarinets of the sun. In this way, we follow the circuit of light as it exists in scientific, imperial, and ecopoietic realities: as object, resource, energy, process, movement, and even sound, circulating between the yellow sun (in a blue sky) and the yellow earth (over black soil), with life emerging as earth in formations within which we find ourselves today, at this moment of Anthropocenic, wartime, collective precarity.
[. . .]
In some respects, Feodosiy (Fedir) Tetianych‘s (1942-2007) life embodied a “Ukraino-futurism,” a futurism that, rather like the work of Afrofuturism progenitor Sun Ra, fused together eclectic but highly skilled artistry with a folk-art sensibility, mock-serious utopianism, and space-age regalia and technological gadgetry. Known for street-art installations called biotekhnosfery (biotechnospheres), created from recycled trash and representing vehicles of the future, a future he named “Frypulia” (Freepoolia), Tetianych became a fixture on the streets of Kyïv in the 1980s and 1990s. Unlike Russian cosmism, his Ukraino-futurism lacked both messianic fervor and imperial ambition; less utopian than heterotopian, its role was to question institutional constraints, without taking itself too seriously, through a kind of carnivalesque performative bricolage. As artist Yuri Leiderman notes, Tetianych’s cosmism was “autochthonous” and “rustic in its very essence,” a vision in which “Earth, covered by soil, by ground, with all kinds of vegetation stemming from it, resembles an enormous canvas hurtling through space.”
“I asked myself,” Tetianych noted in an interview, “how thickly the earth could be attached to a canvas and decided why not attach a canvas to the entire planet. So that’s what I did. I still have and keep an artwork called ‘Planet Earth, attached to my canvas.’”
[. . .]
Over centuries, the steppe grasslands of those “wild fields” have seen peoples come and go: Cimmerians, Scythians, Sarmatians, Goths, Huns, Avars, Bulgars, Khazars, Mongols, Turks, and Tatars, among others more distant from us. Some rode horses and chariots, left burial mounds rich with gold, or brought their herds of ungulates to graze across the rivers of grass. Most moved on or faded into the mists of historical and ecological change. In a rich survey of the many pastoral and nomadic peoples that have traversed the Eurasian steppes over millennia, historian Kenneth Harl shows, unknowingly (as he doesn’t note the similarity), that there is something that remains from them in the blue-over-yellow horizontal bands of today’s Ukrainian flag:
“The first nomads on the Pontic-Caspian steppes held in awe the two principal features of their physical world: the eternal blue sky, and the grasslands rolling endlessly to the distant horizon. Hence, an all-powerful, all-seeing lord of the heavens ruled above, and his consort was the fertile earth.”
That fertile earth remained largely untamed, with only burial mounds to mark the presence of the past, until Russian imperial power annexed these lands in the eighteenth century. In its continental variant of settler-colonialism, it remade them into arable fields, a standing reserve of soil enframed, measured, and set to work by Dokuchaev and his followers.
Ukraino-futurism in this sense stands as a form of boundary-work, poised between agriculturalization (which is imperialization), the turning of soil into plowed and cultivated resource; another kind of future resourcification, that of the sun’s rays directly into energy for the feedlots of capital, even as it transitions to “green” capital; and the nomadic drift of a regenerative grassland that gives birth to roaming invention, even as it washes away its traces in history.
As Harl notes, “nomadic peoples built few cities and left little writing,” but “they gave to us the horse, spoke-wheeled vehicles, saddles and stirrups, the composite bow, riding trousers, belts and boots as the masculine garb, yogurt, and ayran.” One might add, with a nod to the Ukrainian Cossack Hetmanate state of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the Makhnovite anarchists of the early twentieth, a penchant for freedom and direct democracy. “They played a crucial role,” Harl continues, “as transmitters of knowledge, religions, goods, and technology across Eurasia from one civilization to the next.”
The book is pricey, but write to me if you’d like a pre-print of our chapter.
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