Trans-Historical Railway: A Play upon the Lost Futures of Russia.
An installation by DerailedLab at the Institute of Light, 376 Helmsley Pl,
London E8 3SB
Opening Party 6pm, May 8th 2017
‘History would be a wonderful thing – if only it were true’ Leo Tolstoy
There is an often
quoted passage in the essay ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ by the early
twentieth century German theorist Walter Benjamin, in which he reads the figure
portrayed in the Paul Klee painting ‘Angelus Novus’ as the ‘angel of history’.
He describes the angel caught in the winds of time, blown into the future but
facing the past. It is often imagined that the angel is blown in one direction,
in a straight line of progress, but perhaps it is more appropriate to imagine
him dragged over the surface of our planet in the complex patterns of
geo-historical dynamics, and over Russia at least, caught in all kinds of
eddies, cyclones and tornados. Such at least, was the experience of Derailed
Lab on its summer 2016 expedition along the Trans-Siberian railway from St
Petersburg to Vladivostok, where we found evidence of multiple lost futures,
estranged pasts and dynamic presents, all active across the Russian
landscape.
Having previously presented
our reflections upon this expedition at the Strelka Institute in Moscow through
a large scale drawing-performance, in this new work Derailed Lab has
re-imagined the Trans-Siberian railway as a trans-historical space-time
machine, and has designed a strategy game to explore the parallel histories –
both really-existing and counter-factual – which co-exist in this territory.
The railway itself was born out of a Tsarist imperial space-time, and this
nineteenth century technology co-evolved with the revolutionary constructivist
architectural and urban experiments of the twenties and thirties, which
punctuate the towns and cities along the railway, and which suggest an
alternative future that still haunts us today. The Stalinist palaces built
later in the twentieth century – both underground and overground – project a
neo-classical timelessness of sorts, while the recent anxious developments of
Putin’s Russia now agonise alongside the memories of these and all kinds of
other spaces, temporalities and modes of existence.
On the hundredth anniversary
of the Russian Revolution the Trans-Historical Railway will be stopping the
Institute of Light in London for 24hrs, welcome aboard.
The Organising Committee: Raluca Cirstoc and Jon Goodbun together with Joseph Brennan, Cosimo Campani, Miranda Dixon, Edith Fung, Lydia Karagiannaki, Myung Lee and fellow travellers.
Derailed Lab 