Jaanika Arum
- Vabade kunstide teaduskond
- Kaasaegne kunst
- ma
- In the silence of the Echo
- Juhendaja(d): Jaan Toomik
- Room installation/Video
Nymph Echo, after Narcissus’s death, turned into rock from deep sadness. The gods gave her a voice as an echo, giving her the ability to reflect her surroundings with an eternal sound. But she was left without her own personal voice, an inability to express herself.
Two landscapes meet in the work. The objects inside the mouth in a video and artefacts on pedestals in the room are picked up from Kalarand, where they were in an abandoned state at the beginning of construction work and were collected before the weight of the cranes reached them.
The coal in use is a train of thought about a town called Prokopyevsk where my relatives live. It is located in the Siberian landscape, in the huge area of Kuzbass where are some of the world’s largest coal mining fields. The city is largely excavated from underground. Standing on top of a thin crust, quietly sinking into this empty abyss and losing its essence, big part of the Taiga there has been destroyed and many mining shafts have remained in solitary at the end of resources, reflecting a hybrid memory of both. The coal as a fossilised remnant of agent vegetation and objects frozen in abandonment from Kalarand meet in the echo, so their essence could stand out.
