The performance uses the relief as a way of perceiving the world. The relief as a stage between image and space. The moment when the figure breaks free of the flat surface and gains its own independent life. When we decide who we want to be. When geological contours are divided and becomes countries. The performance examines the Ukraine seen in geopolitical relief.

The Ukraine, a country with both a distinctive Russian and European influence, gained its independence in 1991. Via interviews with inhabitants of the multicultural seaport of Odessa, the contours of a Ukraine emerge that has a new cultural self-understanding. A history is being created.

The performance is enacted between the surface of the image and the spatiality of the sound. An investigation of the conditions of sensory perception takes place, captured in a filmic relief. Images in real time blend with recordings made in the Ukraine and are placed in a three-dimensional sound-space. As intense echoes from concrete locations, the sounds anchor the images of the performance in space and geography.

A person finds himself between the surface and the space. He is a link, an example of a man about to start his life. As the Russian author Vladimir Nabokov, when as a young man in 1917 he found himself on the Crimean peninsula (now the Ukraine). From here he travelled to Europe, USA and finally to Switzerland, where he died in 1977. Nabokov never returned to Russia. He was the immigrant with a dual gaze, directed at Europe but belonging to Russia.

In the same way as Nabokov’s life became a journey between countries, it also became one between disciplines. He was an author, a scientist and a university teacher. He expressed it this way: “In a work of art there is a kind of merging between the precision of poetry and the excitement of pure science. I believe that.” Nabokov devoted much work to the study and classification of butterflies. Today, there are a number of species of butterflies that bear the name Nabokov.

We are in constant motion as individuals and societies, between fiction and reality, between all the existing strata of reality. We detect, experience without sorting. We reflect, sort, organise. We express ourselves. The performance´s tripartition, the street, the studio and the stage, are used as an organizing structure, while the relief is used as a narrative mode. Reality is composed and shifts, breaks free and is constantly turning into new formations.