Ruins, ghost spaces define the cracks of urban environments. These are spaces for rethinking, redefining, reappropriating by artists, researchers, activists. These are spaces seized, reconstructed, destructed by power and capital.
Cinemas in the Dominican Republic mark the transition from colonial to postcolonial times, the ruins of modernist buildings in Athens, Tripoli and Dnipro define the end of the era of utopian architecture, the abandoned infrastructure of the border city of Armenia determines the beginning of a free armed economic zone.
It would seem, how we can relate here, in Kyiv?
BÉTON AMER
Chloé Simonin, Margot Lançon
Switzerland, Greece / 2019, 16 min
At dawn, a group of friends meet on the rooftop of a school in Athens. It's their ritual. As it overlooks the city, this place is symbolic and it will be theirs until the next morning.
The film tells the story of a group of teenagers wandering on the peripheries. They will cross a place kept under surveillance: Hellinikon. For six decades, Hellinikon was the only airport in Athens and it also hosted the Olympic Games infrastructure. Since then, weeds have invaded the ruins of sports facilities. As if sedimented, all the marks of its past are still inscribed in Hellinikon. Before the site is razed and transformed, before its memory disappears, the youths decide to get in it.
CONCRETE FORMS OF RESISTANCE
Nick Jordan
Lebanon, UK / 2019, 27 min
Filmed in Tripoli, Lebanon, Concrete Forms of Resistance is a documentary centred upon the city’s abandoned ‘Permanent International Fair’, designed by Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer. The film presents layered themes of progress and crisis, material and memory, contrasting the Utopian vision of the original plans with the realities of religious conflict, regional instability and rising inequalities.
A PASSAGE
Felix Kalmenson, Rouzbeh Akhbari
Armenia / 2019, 17 min
‘A Passage’ is a film which tackles the political economy and social ecology of border infrastructures in Southern Armenia. By focusing on two significant events that illustrate the dominant political shifts in the region, ‘A Passage’ looks at how processes of rapid militarization and neoliberalization have restructured these borders. These two events include the recent erasure of the historic Yerevan-Baku Railway; and the upcoming construction of an industrial Free Economic Zone (FEZ) planned precisely where the removed train infrastructure was housed. The film stitches together various contested sites of the region including Meghri’s abandoned airport, a functioning Soviet-era Copper and Molybdenum mine, a 16th century church the abandoned Karchivan and Meghri train stations and an abandoned rail tunnel that bridges the geopolitical boundary of Nakhchivan and Armenia.
WE WAITED UNTIL NIGHTFALL
Wendy V. Muñiz, Guillermo Zouain
Dominican Republic / 2019, 18 min
We waited until nightfall revisits repurposed cinemas through hunting images and sounds that trace the practices of belonging still embodied in the theaters’ remains.
CONCRETE AND UNCLEAR
Lera Malchenko, Oleksandr Hants
Ukraine / 2019, 31 min
In the center of city Dnipro, Ukraine, during the 50 years abandoned hotel ‘PARUS’ (SAIL) is existing. It had to become the symbol of the grandiosity of Dnipropetrovsk as the homeland of the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. However, it has never been opened — the construction stopped on the eve of collapse of the Soviet Union.
From the 2000 the PARUS is being depicted like a finished building on calendars, in memes, in art-projects and visualizations. For a lot of people in Dnipro it is already the symbol of the city, although it is unfinished.