"Are you here?" at French Spring Festival 2021, as a part of Blue Labyrint project.

"Are you here?" is a live set based on the sounds of Lybid river, a long forgotten actor of the Kyiv city landscape, which once was one of the biggest of its rivers. Nowadays, the major part of it is hidden in the underground collectors, and its above-ground territory is severely neglected.

Blue Labyrint is a project on the integrity of urban space that takes place in the format of a Ukrainian and French art residency. The goal of the project is to restore the memory of its small rivers to the city.

Are you here? Lybid Live 2021

The hall №19 "Old Rivne" in the exposition of new and modern history of the Rivne Regional Local History Museum presents a historical architectural model of the city of Rivne at the end of the XVIII century (model author: Peter Rychkov). In "Sounds of a River That Remembers Everything the City Doesn't," Anna Ivchenko suggests looking at rivers as witnesses to events and changes that left no memories, the artifacts of which have been destroyed. The artist creates an audio archive of the reservoirs that now exist in the city, which has changed significantly in the XX century and lost its memory along with the changing aquatic landscape.

The sounds of a river that remembers everything the city doesn't

A Monument to Irpin River is a sound installation based on field recordings of Irpin River located in the Kyiv region. The piece attempts to reflect on the commemoration practices of the ongoing war, as well as on the, previously dominating in the public space of Ukraine, Soviet commemorative practices and the narratives that they have spread and normalized, using commemoration as an ideological tool.

When imagining the future in which Ukraine wins the war, a question appears — how will we commemorate this war? In this piece I attempt to drift away from the human-centered and victory-manifesting monuments and turn the viewer’s gaze to the landscape within which we live, the river, acknowledging the help that it provided us with, and the damage that it had been through.

In 1941, the first defense line of Kyiv passed along the Irpin River. In 2022, history repeated itself: the detonation of part of the dam on the Irpin River and the flooding of its floodplain became a decisive moment in the battle for Kyiv. The river was used as a tool of resistance, cutting off the enemy's possible way to the capital. Knowing that, I keep thinking: what if there was no river at all? What if the river had dried up at that time? What would be the turn of events in that case?  An audio piece created using field recordings of Irpin River and played from a speaker on a pedestal is an attempt to reflect on this topic.

A Monument to Irpin River — Live @ HAU Berlin

Trapped in Air is a site-specific audio installation located at the House of Craftsmen’s Association (Handwerkervereinshaus, now Sophiensaele). This place used to be a place of forced labor, where among others, Ukrainian women used to be exploited as forced workers during World War II. There is almost no information about those people — the only thing we know is that they worked for a factory that produced high-precision grinding machines and small armaments. The sound installation is based on both real and fictional letters of Ukrainian Ostarbeiters, which highlights the impossibility of fully recovering the memory about them

Trapped In Air

Сердечне Запрошення (Cordial Invitation)

Fear Of Turning Into Stone

"Salvation" is a sound composition based on data obtained from the eponymous painting by Augusta Kochanowska.

Augusta Kochanowska (1868-1927) is known as the first and one of the most important artists of Bukovina (a historical region, variously described as in Central or Eastern Europe). Despite this, we now know only a few facts about her life. It is not known where most of her works are, the exact date of the artist's birth has been established only recently (dates like 1863, 1866 and 1868 can be found in various sources). Olga Kobylyanska, Ukrainian writer, with whom the artist has been close friends since childhood, describes her as a delicate and romantic person who reacts sharply to all life events. Kochanowska's most subtle personality is manifested in her painting "Salvation".

"Salvation" is a work of the last year of the artist's life. By converting each of his pixels into a note using a computer algorithm, I created an electronic composition that became a sound transcription of Kokhanovskaya's painting. By placing this sound installation in the hall of the Chernivtsi Art Museum, I give "Salvation" a symbolic opportunity to be in the museum among other works of the artist, but even with this presence, the painting itself remains invisible. It is not known exactly where "Salvation" is now, so the musical composition becomes the only possible connection between the picture and the viewer in this space.

Poriatunok

Poriatunok//Salvation

Anna Ivchenko (CARE) is a Ukrainian audiovisual artist and musician living in Berlin, a member of _mediaklub experimental electronic music band. Anna creates experimental soundscapes and sound installations on the edge of ambient and noise, using a combination of modular synthesizers and field recordings. 

https://soundcloud.com/mediaklub

Anna Ivchenko

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