Lyuda Kalinichenko
Enemy Mine
site-specific installation at the Aramil Textile Factory: video, memory-foam bench, and fabric sculpture
Lyuda Kalinichenko: This work was inspired by Barry Longyear’s novella Enemy Mine (1979), and in particular by a dialogue between an Earthman and a Draconian about the difference between memory and forgetting.
Metal, laser cutting, artist-made glass, found object
The Drac looked at me, its eyes filled with pity. "Davidge, how lost you must feel. You humans— how lost you must feel."
"Lost?"
Jerry nodded. "Where do you come from, Davidge?"
"You mean my parents?"
"Yes."
I shrugged. "I remember my parents."
"And their parents?"
"I remember my mother's father. When I was young we used to visit him."
"Davidge, what do you know about this grandparent?"
I rubbed my chin. "It's kind of vague ... I think he was in some kind of agriculture—I don't know."
"And his parents?"
I shook my head. "The only thing I remember is that somewhere along the line, English and Germans figured. Gavey Germans and English?"
Jerry nodded. "Davidge, I can recite the history of my line back to the founding of my planet by Jeriba Ty, one of the original settlers, one hundred and ninety-nine generations ago. At our line's archives on Draco, there are the records that trace the line across space to the racehome planet, Sindie, and there back seventy generations to Jeriba Ty, the founder of the Jeriba line."
"How does one become a founder?"
"Only the firstborn carries the line. Products of second, third, or fourth births must found their own lines."
I nodded, impressed. "Why only the five names? Just to make it easier to remember them?"
Jerry shook its head. "No. The names are things to which we add distinction; they are the same, commonplace five so that they do not overshadow the events that distinguish their bearers. The name I carry, Shigan, has been served by great soldiers, scholars, students of philosophy, and several priests. The name my child will carry has been served by scientists, teachers, and explorers."
"You remember all of your ancestors' occupations?"
Jerry nodded. "Yes, and what they each did and where they did it. You must recite your line before the line's archives to be admitted into adulthood as I was twenty-two of my years ago. Zammis will do the same, except the child must begin its recitation"—Jerry smiled—"with my name, Jeriba Shigan."
"You can recite almost two hundred biographies from memory?"
"Yes."
As I listened to Jerry's singsong of formal Dracon, the backward biographies—beginning with death and ending with adulthood—I experienced a sense of time-binding, of being able to know and touch the past. Battles, empires built and destroyed, discoveries made, great things done—a tour through twelve thousand years of history, but perceived as a well-defined, living continuum.
Against this: I, Willis of the Davidge line, stand before you, born of Sybil the housewife and Nathan the second-rate civil engineer, one of them born of Grandpop, who probably had something to do with agriculture, born of nobody in particular… Hell, I wasn't even that! My older brother carried the line; not me. I listened and made up my mind to memorize the line of Jeriba.
Video installation: video, 6 min 20 sec. Bench: fabric, memory foam.
Valentin Diaconov, curator and art critic, on the exhibition
L. Kalinichenko, Enemy Mine, at the Aramil Cloth Factory
Memory is a delicate matter, and all the tools we use to measure it are imprecise and imperfect. These tools also change with every generation. Once, the family album — and its “playback devices”, living relatives — served both as the sonar and the storage system of memory. As the memory capacity of phones and computers has increased, so has the number of seconds we are able to revive, if we understand the past as a dead zone, or to experience again, if we think of the past as a score that can be performed once more.
Lyudmila Kalinichenko’s exhibition at the Aramil Cloth Factory takes place at the very centre of a transformation of memory and its instruments. The factory offers a memory of the body: it suggests gestures and shapes muscles. A museum in this place can reshape consciousness, tuning the mind to look into the depth of past eras and to understand the experience of living witnesses.
It is fitting that the first exhibition in the space of the future museum is dedicated to two types of memory. The artist draws inspiration from Enemy Mine, a novella by the American writer Barry Longyear, which — a rare achievement — received both major American awards for science fiction prose: the Hugo and the Nebula. In the story, representatives of two civilisations meet: an Earthman and a Draconian. Enemies at first, they are forced to coexist on an unfamiliar planet and gradually become friends.
It turns out that they have completely different ideas about family history. The Earthman remembers only his parents and a little about his grandfather. The Draconian knows the entire history of their lineage, going back to the first ancestor who discovered the planet. Significantly, the Draconian is dual-sexed and reproduces through self-fertilisation. In other words, they possess both a conditionally “female” and a conditionally “male” memory of ancestry.
In Kalinichenko’s work, these two types of memory are also presented as a dialogue, just as in Longyear’s story. The human type of memory unfolds through the artist’s account of her family history, told through the female line. This kind of memory is directly connected to Christian civilisation, where human life is structured as a series of confessions leading towards redemption and spiritual transformation.
Sculptures: wooden structure, synthetic padding, photo-printed fabric, water-repellent fabric
The alien figure appears as something between a monster with a dragon’s head and a deity resembling Anubis from Egyptian mythology. This association seems far from accidental: Anubis was the god of funerary rites, which in every civilisation served as rituals for fixing and preserving memory.
This Anubis from outer space is a construction made of fabrics, with an ornament based on photographs from the family archive and still lifes containing various vegetables, fruit and elements of kitchen life. To the linear narrative of memories and events, it opposes the steady rhythm of reproduction. We should remember that the word “reproduction” means not only the copying of an image, but also biological reproduction.
This type of memory is connected to collective ritual, in which ancestors and descendants are included in the circulation of family resources. Here, history is not linear, but repeats itself with each new cycle of reproduction, in close connection with nature. A personal story can become a fragment of a monumental mosaic, where human DNA is intertwined with the DNA of plants, animals and minerals.
Next to the alien stand abstract traps — tools invented by the artist for searching for and collecting memories. Unfamiliar objects in a relative’s home can, through their strangeness, inspire a child to fix a moment and its atmosphere. Later, in adulthood, these objects become vessels for long-held sensations.
Sometimes, to remember means to drown: in details, stray fragments and, of course, trauma. Few family histories reaching back into the previous century are free from memories of cruelty, both personal and political. Kalinichenko’s two types of memory also offer two techniques of forgetting. Human memory selects only what needs to be remembered in order to keep living and not fall into despair.
The alien’s memory offers consolation through the ritual of a shared meal and the ghost of abundance — the goal and hope of every family history.
The installation Enemy Mine is also structured as a dialogue: on one side, there is a direct retelling of family history and an attempt to adopt the traditions of an extraterrestrial civilisation; on the other, an alien figure dressed in armour made of cushions printed with a protective amulet pattern.
These protective measures — prints and soft cushions — become a metaphor for comfortable memory: a memory that not only protects in emergency situations, but also becomes a hiding place where something valuable and personal can be kept. Throughout the factory space, memory traps are placed: déjà vu, intrusive memories, short-term memory, repetition and gaps.
The factory space itself becomes the backdrop for this dialogue: an uninhabited island and the condition that allows the dialogue to take place.
Special thanks to the NITIKHITIN team, Svetlana, Natalia, Angela, Anton, Valentin, Sergey, Yuri, Ksenia, Elena, Nastya, Tatiana, Vasily and Dima.