phenomenon
phenomenon is made from surviving early 1990s Hi8 videotape of ‘schwimmen’, a teenage industrial/noise band from the (then-Soviet) city of Novosibirsk. Comprised of footage shot from and within the seventh-floor apartment where they lived and worked communally, the video radiates a sense of cinematic immediacy, capturing the lost world of immanence of being. It ultimately taps into the vital, uncertain energy of the ephemeral ‘paranormal’ space—both historical and metaphorical—where the only metaphor is optical. The camera pans along frozen squares and zooms into details of the immediate surroundings, innocently reinventing tropes from video-art of the preceding two decades, in which ‘what happens’ is not an event but an experience. —Anya Tsyrlina & Sid Iandovka