Screenshots

2011 24.08 – 08.09 Yampil Regional Museum and a private housing on Chornomortsia st, Yampil Vinnytska obl. Ukraine

Light-projection installation
Site-specific

In small regional museums, it is interesting to take into account a period that finalizes a museumification of everyday life, and the border by which the contemporaneity begins. It is clear that the last industrial and agricultural achievements documentation ended somewhere near 1991 when the USSR collapsed and museum development practically ceased for at least ten years.

Sometimes cheap inkjet photos telling about further official events of independent Ukraine appear. These cases are rare. Moreover, installations of places where well-known persons lived and worked are usually dated not later than the beginning of the 20th century.

By 2011 my grandmother’s residential house was unoccupied for some years; the garden and vineyard were cut down, and everything was in the state of gradual collapse and disappearance. Old furniture in the rooms of her house had some value for the Yampil regional museum researchers, and finally, the house had been opened for visitors at Town day and a week after it with the museum’s support. The building itself was erected as a typical 1940s’ project paid by the monetary help given to WWII veterans after the war. There are three or four similar houses in Yampil district.

Backlit prints with views from the house windows photographed years ago when grandmother was alive were glued to windowpanes in order to restore the natural appearance of the rooms. They transformed a then empty backyard into a flourishing garden. Powerful discharge spotlights were installed outside and focused on the windows to bring the effect of an eternal sunny day at any time and weather conditions, like during a motion picture filming process.

The main task of my experiments with the museum was to extend a period of everyday life available to museumification until now, but the final decision made by the museum fellows was positive only because of old furniture from the early 20th century. The contemporaneity remained transparent for them.

Video documentation with excursion tours held by museum fellows remained in its archive and may appear here sometime.
Another project with similar intentions was done in Moscow later.