EXOPLANETS

Darya Tsymbalyuk:

 

My name is Darya, and I draw, write, and transgress academic disciplines. I am interested in science fiction for its challenge of imagination and the emancipatory power this imagination can bring. I am also interested, though also cautious and even skeptical sometimes, in the utopic visions often inspired by the explorations of space. Perhaps this interest is rooted in a personal story, a story about my nan Nina, who was present on the Red Square in Moscow, when Yuri Gagarin first addressed the people after his landing in 1961. My nan was the first one in her family to go study at the Moscow State University from a small Ukrainian village in the south of Russia, and for me her personal trajectory and her story of seeing Gagarin eclipsed in a sudden, radical, and dreamy space (space!) where something one can only imagine comes into the living matter of the world. At the same time, finishing this project during the escalation of Russia’s war on my homeland Ukraine, I feel bitter about utopic narratives from the Soviet Union. This is very much what I have thought about when I was working on the images for the project, as well as trying to bring all its different multilingual strands together.