Solastalgic Soliloquy
Single-channel digital video
5:27 minutes
2020
Solastalgic Soliloquy was observed in Glasgow, the Ukrainian Cultural Centre on treaty 4 land, the territories of the nêhiyawak (Cree), Anihšināpēk (Saulteaux), Dakota, Lakota, and Nakoda, as well as the homeland of the Métis/Michif Nation, Canada and the Białowieża Forest in Poland, which is the last primal forest in Europe.
Credits:
Anika Ahuja, Soojin Chang, Nicholas Dmyterko, Mood Hussain, Ali Lotz, Paige Silverman
This film was first premiered through MAP Magazine (Glasgow, Scotland) with accompanying text Certainty and its Refractions written by Dr. Ranjana Thapalyal. Presented in solo exhibition, Vyshyvani Kazky, Embroidered Stories at Zalucky Contemporary and Ritual & Lore at the Art Gallery of Regina (Canada)
It was screened at Alchemy Film Festival 2022 (Hawick, Scotland) in Our Shape Apparently as well as in And the land breathes back through aCinema Space (Milwaukee, USA).
Supported by the Shevchenko Foundation
Folkloric dance choreography becomes an apparatus to convey ways that traditions cease and exist through approproation, assimilation, when disconnected from a natural environment and removed from congregation. Generational slippage emerges as muscle memory fails and fragments. Leaning on symbolism a cast wax wreath adorned in church candles, those lit for ancestors passed illustrates the dangers of nostalgia and sentimentalizing the past.
How am I to protect my wax built castles of love from the devouring heat of your flames?
