Mikhail Karikis » Children of Unquiet

Children of Unquiet: the video

wp_mikhail — Mon, 20 Jul 2015 11:28:53 +0000

In this film Mikhail Karikis orchestrates a children’s ‘take over’ of an uninhabited workers’ village in Italy centering on the children’s aural and physical interventions. The work features forty-five children who are growing up around a deserted industrial village, abandoned by their parents after the complete automation of the local geothermal power plant where they all worked. The site is in the Devil’s Valley in Tuscany, known for inspiring the hellish descriptions of Dante’s Inferno and for being the place where the first sustainable energy power plant in the world was built. In Karikis’s video, youngsters between five and twelve years old seize the depopulated sites transforming the vaporous wasteland into a self-organised school and a playground. Their ‘take over’ takes different forms across the three chapters of the film and treats the voice and language in different ways. In the first chapter the children present an aural portrait of the place where they are growing up by imitating the sounds of their surroundings: that is through onomatopoeic play with the powerful subterranean rumbles and factory drones in the area. In the following chapter they congregate in the Modernist ruins to read and dis-articulate philosophical texts by Toni Nergi & Michael Hardt about production, the industriousness of bees and love, while the closing chapter bursts with the noise of play and laughter as the children storm into the deserted village.

At sites like the geothermal valley where Children of Unquiet is located, cracks on the surface of the earth bring us so close to the gigantic forces operating inside our planet that we witness an immensity which is indifferent to the temporal dynamics of economics and capitalist demands for quick profit. The children’s speculative and playful interventions and their concert with their natural and industrial surroundings generate the opportunity for individual and communal expression, challenging narratives of a failed human project and evoking different possible, desired or imagined futures.

Produced by Radio Papesse, Florence.

Larderello: the Board Game

wp_mikhail — Mon, 20 Jul 2015 11:28:46 +0000

This work activates decision-making processes, dilemmas and conflicts echoing the contrasting socio-economic narratives of de-industrialisation and automation, coupled with depopulation and worker migration. The Board Game focuses on the village of Larderello in the Devil’s Valley in Tuscany where sustainable energy production was invented in the early 1900s and the first geothermal power station in the world was built. Until recently, five thousand workers and their families lived there in a group of iconic modernist industrial villages constructed by the Italian modernist architect Giovanni Michelucci around the power plant. Following the introduction of automated and remote operation technologies in the power plant, unemployment increased and prospects for the young became limited resulting in the rapid depopulation or abandonment of entire villages. The Board Game is designed for two players or teams, it is presented in two languages and consists of several hundred hand-made components, such as game tiles and instruction cards. This work is part of the project Children of Unquiet (2013-2014).

Visions: a super-8 film & photographs

wp_mikhail — Mon, 20 Jul 2015 11:27:55 +0000

Visions is an installation comprising a super-8 film displayed on a moviola, photographs and light. The super-8 film animates children’s visions of the future of their homes in the depopulated villages in the Devil’s Valley in Tuscany, where they are growing up, through a series of futurological drawings and urban plans generated in workshops with the artist and transferred onto film. The super-8 film is displayed on the moviola, which is operated by the viewers, and is accompanied by a series of photographs depicting the children in various states of aural contemplation: listening to the geothermal sounds of the earth, to the sustained sounds of the local power plant, as well as to each other. The installation includes a light bulb and a cotton cable creating an outline on the wall. This work is part of the project Children of Unquiet (2013-2014).

The Photographic Series – Children of Unquiet

wp_mikhail — Mon, 20 Jul 2015 11:26:48 +0000

Mikhail Karikis devised a series of drawing workshops with children aged 7-8 y/o growing up around the depopulated villages near Larderello, which were abandoned by their parents after the automation of the local power plant where they worked. Following a guided tour of the deserted areas by a former employee of the power plant, geologist and resident of Larderello, the artist asked the children to draw the village the way they imagine repopulating it and living there in the future. The subsequent children’s drawings were installed within a selection of deserted sites in the villages related to the children and photographed by the artist. In this work the non-linear arrangement of past, present and future, the intergenerational sharing of life-visions, and the implied complexities of utopia versus dystopia come into play.

102 Years Out of Synch

wp_mikhail — Mon, 20 Jul 2015 11:25:13 +0000

An audio-visual performance that also exists as a sound installation exploring the striking legendary, literary and cinematic connections between the invention of sustainable energy production, Dante’s Inferno, the first Italian feature film, and the sonic imaginary of Hell. This work takes place at the geothermal site of the Devil’s Valley in Tuscany, where the first and still one of the largest geothermal power plants is based. Local legend claims that in the 14th Century, Dante visited the site and drew inspiration from its arresting geology for his famous epic poem Inferno. In turn, the year 1911 saw the cinematic adaptation of Dante’s poem in the homonymous first Italian silent feature film directed by Giuseppe de Liguoro. Despite the countless visual representations of Hell inspired by this Tuscan location, its rich sonorities have remained mute. In 102 Years Out of Synch, Mikhail Karikis retraces Dante’s steps in an attempt to hear what the poet might have heard. He visits the site to record its volatile geothermal sounds and the rumbling industrial noise that marks the contemporary local soundscape. Combining newly filmed footage and fragments of the 1911 silent film, environmental sound recordings, narration and extended vocals, 102 Years Out of Synch mines the strata of legend, industrial archaeology, subterranean resonance and the aural imaginary.

The sound installation 102 Year Out of Synch was first realised for Witte de With in Rotterdam in 2015 and reconfigures the material presented in the performance. It comprises a wall paper, a stereo sound installation paying from a vinyl record and a video projection.

Love Is the Institution of Revolution

wp_mikhail — Mon, 20 Jul 2015 11:24:49 +0000

A multicoloured oil pastel drawing of the central phrase appearing in Mikhail Karikis’s video Children of Unquiet drawn by the artist by copying children’s handwriting.