Adonis Vernalis Dreamings

2021 - ongoing

Digital composite images, photography, collage, writing

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“Wisdom that comes through the night” says one of Olha Kobylianska’s characters in her novel “Land” referring to learning in dreams. I follow Adonis vernalis into the environments of my home, hot-yellow hues, the layered geology of khrushchovka panel houses, blooming fruit trees, ghosts of the typewriter factory, drying rivers. Do these khrushchovka basements dream about the past full of wheat dreaming of the past full of feathergrass, tarpans, saiga antelopes, groundhogs and adonis vernalis? Does this filter through into my dreams somehow, up the drainpipes and the hot summer air as I sleep with my window wide open? What would a place look like if Adonis vernalis’ dreams were centred in planning and regional development? How do I restory my place from the “land of productive land and hard working people'' to something more attuned to the geological plateaus, the soils, ways of being and speaking, the fungal & vegetal life, the birds, insects and other animals that are all part of the web of life of my kin region?  A nation < kin region with all its web of life.

Related work

Adonis vernalis dreamings: (re)making kin with a place, part of south/south dialogues: Beyond the colonial vortex of the ‘West’: Subverting non-western imperialisms before and after 24 February 2022. South/South Movement, 2023

Kinship in our damaged land, Scottish Left Review, 2023