Rehearsals of Refusal
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Rehearsals of Refusal is an artistic research project that departs from my personal separation from the place where I was born and where my parents grew up:
Crimea. Departing from an autoethnographic perspective, where personal experience is used to understand cultural experience, I question and think through notions of belonging on a bigger scale. The project imagines potential forms of reconnection through work with clay, language, performance, and traces from personal and historical archives. At its centre is Re-Inhabiting the Salted Earth, a video performance in which I ritualistically transform local Scandinavian clay by infusing it with salt, ashes, and powdered clay from the Black Sea region. This clay mixture becomes a material of healing and restoration. I use the clay to build funerary vessels – objects that hold space for mourning and for the possibility to repair.
A central piece in the project display is a sculptural fountain relief, made from the same clay mixture used in the ritual performance. This piece refers to the Fountain of Tears in Bakhchysarai, the city in Crimea where I was born. The fountain was built in the 18th century by a Crimean Tatar khan in memory of a lost love.
Inspired by Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s concept of potential history, which is an experimental method in unlearning imperial ways of being and knowing, this project refuses fixed separations between the past and the present, the living and the dead, what is recorded and what has been left out. Instead of closure, I choose relation. A way of staying close, even when the distance seems big.
@mariaantchougova
mariaantchougova@gmail.com
Link to MFA essay: https://gupea.ub.gu.se/handle/2077/86615
