“Technology is nothing. What’s important is that you have a faith in people,
that they’re basically good and smart, and if
you give them tools, they’ll do wonderful things
with them.”
Steve Jobs
Opening an article about an exhibition of ethnographic reportage by the French artist Vincent Moon with an epigraph from Steve Jobs — and one about technical tools, no less — may seem odd, to say the least, if not downright out of place. So let me try to explain why this quotation came to mind in the context of this article. The thing is, this is the first time I have had to review an exhibition remotely, so to speak.
All the video works shown at the exhibition were available online, and so was the report from its opening: the twenty-first century opens up a broad spectrum of possibilities to us, and we need to know how to use them properly. The ability to shoot video or take photos now sits in everyone’s pocket, which is why we underrate this gift, which thousands of human heads and hands worked on for years... And all so that today we can take selfies non-stop, without in the least admiring the possibilities of all these little and not-so-little boxes that surround us. I wonder how many times Talbot or the Lumière brothers turn in their graves whenever yet another pair of plump little pouting lips appears on an iPhone sensor? But back to the subject.
A human being cannot take in the whole span of time the Earth has existed; we are simply incapable of grasping the real number of days and years humankind has spent on the planet. And that’s not all: we find it hard to grasp even comparatively tiny stretches of time. Sometimes you tell a story about something, believing it happened last year, and suddenly realise that ten years have already gone by. And the pace of life keeps accelerating, ever more relentlessly. Old and new media alike spin this centrifuge of time with all their might — the former by the power of persuasion, the latter simply by existing. Not getting lost in this labyrinth of technologies is becoming ever harder, as the old meanings of existence seem paltry beside the newest ones and those that prophesy the future. In the chase for the latest iPhone model or more pixels, the purity of meaning is lost: we forget that we need a phone first and foremost to communicate, and a camera to collect life’s most important moments. Yet today every moment seems the most important, and so none of them really is. Being able to take hundreds of instant photos does not enrich the photographic archive with hundreds of masterpieces; instead, it clutters our information space with visual noise.
From today’s vantage point, the simplest occupations, which made up the meaning of our ancestors’ lives, look like a blatant waste of time. And a huge number of professions are becoming history, having passed the baton to strange mongrels: concrete, comprehensible work is done by machines, while people occupy the most varied positions, whose titles are impossible to remember and whose duties are very hard to tell apart. If until recently a split personality was considered an illness, it is hard to say whether today this deviation hasn’t become the norm: we lead two lives, the real and the virtual. Not long ago such a prospect seemed likely, but only in the distant future. And yet today updating your status on social media is the guarantee of your modernity/completeness: you may be a brilliant photographer, a musician, or a plumber for that matter, but if you can’t be found on a search engine, then you, with all your achievements for humanity, do not exist.
After all, the part of humanity that understands the meaning of progress and of the evolution of culture, and tirelessly tries to pour fresh blood into culture by the bucketful, is involuntarily tormented by a question that constantly troubles and haunts you like an obsessive fear: are the things I do important enough? Won’t excessive innovation destroy, along with everything that is frankly archaic, the most important things too? Won’t such rejuvenation of the DNA of culture as a collective concept also affect the DNA of all, or some, regional cultures? And won’t this cause cultural mutation, degeneration... Or perhaps the process has already begun?
Vincent Moon, or rather Mathieu Saura, is a photographer, cameraman and music producer from France. The brightest highlights of Moon’s career are his work on the Take Away Shows project and his music-making with various well-known bands and performers, such as R.E.M. and Tom Jones. But these stages were only the first push towards the truly meaningful and important work of Moon’s life — his spontaneous travelling explorations. What Moon does now is film folk ensembles and the people he meets on his travels. Moon carries out all his projects on his own, without financial backing, and shares the results online. All the finished films are available on his personal website under a free Creative Commons licence. Thus, having once been part of an already new musical culture — one that strives to be independent and free (I am talking about the period when he shot videos for indie artists) — he became freer still: he began recording music whose secrets lie in nature itself...
Our deeds always say more about us than words do, and gestures and facial expressions say more still. The style (and hence the hidden facial expressions and gestures) of Moon’s videos tells us how much he loves simplicity, purity, candour and authenticity. The camerawork may seem imperfect; someone might even say: “Ha, look, the geezer films same as my missus done that wedding on her phone the other day — nothing in focus and nothing but legs in the shot,” — and may well hit the bullseye, because his films are as genuine and alive as reality itself. In Moon’s pictures the cameraman himself is remarkably absent. The act of filming is entirely unobtrusive. Moon’s films are like imagination made material: you don’t need to close your eyes and imagine musicians playing nearby in a meadow, or people singing and dancing in a flat — the image becomes pseudo-three-dimensional: through the monitor you can smell the distinctive scent of the village, and it seems you could touch the pictures and feel the texture of the embroidered shirts and the threaded patterns. The video on the screen becomes more real than the reality of your room, and — paradoxically — this effect is achieved not by ultra-sharp images or sky-high video resolution but, on the contrary, by a blurred and shaky picture. Sometimes the wide shots are out of focus, as if deliberately flattened: all the emphasis is on the main characters, who are not always fully visible; sometimes these are extreme close-ups showing only parts of faces. The camera seems to repeat the movements of your head, as if you were taking part in the action, and the somewhat chaotic glances of a real person. After all, in real life we too notice only the most important details, while the background is usually a blur — scenery for the foreground.
Besides the singing itself — about which one could, of course, write not just dozens of articles but an entire dissertation (I’ll leave that subject to the ethnographers) — the films’ soundtracks quite naturally include snatches of random conversation, laughter, dogs barking, or even the protagonists talking to animals; one such vivid moment flashes by in the film about Lukeriia Koshelova. On the whole, this video seems the most dynamic of all. The heroine herself radiates that atmosphere throughout the film. With her spontaneity and eccentric behaviour, Lukeriia is like a rock star.
All in all, the footage breathes such freedom and insouciance that it is hard to believe that at this very time, on this very Earth, there exist megacities, hustle and bustle, wars, terrorist attacks and all that “reality”. Watching the musicians and dancers (who are, in fact, ordinary people from different corners of Ukraine), you are transported as if in a time machine to times we know, really, only from the lyrics of folk songs and from literature. But these are stories whose truth we can never verify, while Moon’s films give us hope that these stories will not become history. Their honesty and simplicity are so candid that they can convince us our ancestors really were this cheerful and carefree. He seems to be telling us: it’s true, that’s exactly what they were like — full stop! And since I am shooting this video in the twenty-first century, you are just the same now — nothing has changed. Look! It’s you, just as you were hundreds of years ago!
Another protagonist of Moon’s films is nature. Not so long ago, trips “into the great outdoors” were a whim for town-dwellers — those, of course, who had no family in the countryside. Why? Because until recently there was no need for them at all. Now, with every passing year, such trips are becoming a real necessity, since the gulf between humans and nature is becoming almost infinite. And until this gulf grows into a singularity, health-giving contact with living nature is the only way out. It is precisely through contact with “the village” in the broad sense of the term — preferably one that civilisation has touched as little as possible — that we fashion ourselves a bigger spade for digging out, from under the slag heaps of our national amnesia, the riches, or legacy, that Ostap Kostiuk speaks of in his Carpathian chronicle, and acquire the traits that will keep our souls from withering, just as various vitamins keep the body from wasting away.
And finally. The miracle lies in the superpositional (or perhaps super-positive) oxymoronic nature of this whole story. For the fact that I was able to write all this — that is, to describe the presentation of Moon’s ethnographic video material in Yurii Hnatkovskyi’s project “Feel Ukraine” (Lviv Palace of Arts, March 2015) while hundreds of kilometres away from where it actually took place, and on the basis of videos shot all over Ukraine at that — is a real miracle. A miracle that is all too obvious to everyone. Another dimension of the miracle is that these videos are a whole world that you can carry around in your pocket and share with others, and also trade your world for other people’s worlds. The practical value of such a miracle was also stressed by the art historian Natalia Kosmolinska at the presentation of “Feel Ukraine”: “Right now it is very important to introduce Europe to the real Ukraine and real Ukrainians, not to the virtual images that Russia is promoting in the European press...” This miracle is the quintessence of our time: thanks to technology we can be everywhere at once, yet there is a danger of ending up nowhere; we can have several thousand friends and stay in touch with them round the clock, yet be lonely; every second we can cover vast stretches of time — indeed, be independent of time altogether — and yet in reality squander the precious hours called life merely clicking a mouse... One of the heroines of Moon’s films — from the report on the Drevo ensemble, I think — said: “Sometimes it seems to me that I’ll never laugh again the way I used to laugh.” What bottomless melancholy longing there is in these words; yet the happiness of these words lies in the fact that they will never become the past. Because thanks to Moon we now have a model, a projection, an avatar of this and similar worlds, and we can copy and distribute it. It is no longer confined by territorial limits or borders; it is everywhere — it is Goethe’s eternal “Stay, moment, thou art so fair!”, except that this moment will never stop, which makes it even better.
In fact, the logical evolution of this miracle was the “Feel Ukraine” project. Inspired by the material Moon had filmed in Ukraine, the director of the Lviv Palace of Arts, Yurii Hnatkovskyi, conceived of presenting it as an interactive exhibition that would combine, besides the visual, an aural and a tactile component. Taking the wandering aspect of Moon’s work as a basis, the curator built the exhibition as a short journey through the culture of Ukraine, a journey through a labyrinth of Moon’s films, with a carefully chosen musical accompaniment of authentic Ukrainian instruments serving as a signpost. The whole route is carpeted with real grass, so if you wish you can walk it barefoot, thereby loosening the spatio-temporal barriers between centuries, histories and cultures, and becoming for a while closer to nature — and hence to the “program code” that underlies all cultures. It is like virtual reality in reverse — real virtuality, in which the grass plays the role of an external controller, heightening the effect of nature in Moon’s videos. We are invited to draw tangibly closer, through seemingly banal contact with grass, to nature, which has now become something no less virtual for us than a computer game. We have the chance to close our eyes and see Ukraine, hear Ukraine, feel Ukraine...
PS. To my mind, finding a balance between our present selves (in every sense of the term) and our past selves (whom we have almost forgotten) is a task of the utmost importance. But there is something even more important, without which we will not accomplish this task: to achieve this balance, we need historical and cultural memory. Like a beacon blinking in the darkness behind us, indicating at least roughly the distance in time between our former and present selves, visualising it clearly, not letting us forget all the time we have travelled through. With this line of retreat, we will be able to stride forward confidently and boldly towards the “bright future”. So it turns out that the only key with which we can open the door to our future is locked behind that very door, and it is our tradition. The project by Vincent Moon and Yurii Hnatkovskyi extrapolates our past onto the present by the newest means, thereby making history contemporary, if not the present itself. It translates antiquity into the language of computer code, writing our oldest DNA in ones and zeros and so making it intelligible even to machines, thereby keeping the cultural code from ageing and degenerating. So if humankind has not yet found the elixir of physical youth, and will be searching for it for a long time to come, we can at least say that Vincent Moon, and all those who create or support similar projects, have in fact invented an elixir of eternal youth — for culture, at least.
PPS. From 23 April, “Feel Ukraine” will be shown for a month at Galerie II E-WERK (Freiburg, Germany).
Dr. Myroslav Trofymuk
Born in Lviv. Designer, director, musician, researcher, founder of ZEMLA STUDIO. Master of classical philology and digital marketing, PhD in the history of Ukrainian literature. Member of the National Union of Journalists of Ukraine. Since 2022 he has authored the CENTRUM MUNDI audio show for Polish Radio for Ukraine, continuing the same research into the contemporary music scene in Ukraine and Poland.
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