Z Druhoho Boku / From the Other Side
Life performance, photos & field recordings
Presented in Mestské kultúrne stredisko in Humenné, Slovakia as part of the programme of Humenné: The City of Culture 2024.
The event Z druhoho boku (From the Other Side), rather than presenting images and sounds as static, exhibited work, transformed the nohami archive into a shared, living moment. Created in collaboration with musicians from the Carpathian Mountains: Hafia Romaniuk, Illie Babota, and Yura Albichuk, the project brought recorded material back into life through a collective gathering.
“After years of working together with our friends, the oldest generation of singers and musicians, we created a framework that allowed us for spontaneity, dialogue, and mutual listening. We were always welcome in their houses, now we had a chance to invite them and organise a celebration.”
Held in a wedding hall in Humenné, near the borders of Ukraine, Poland, and Hungary, the event wove together archival recordings and live performance. Songs once fading from memory were sung again, alongside younger musicians learning to play po staromu—“the old way”. The wedding band featured Hafia (voice), Illie (fiddle and flutes), Yura (voice, zongora) and Lucia (zongora and drum), David (fiddle, drum) .
“We followed relationships between archive and present, documentation and expression, observer and participant. How does cultural memory travel? How does it survive displacement, translation, and time?”
Traditional dishes prepared by Lucia’s family and homemade spirits distilled by David’s helped to the gradual dissolution of all of the boundaries. The 86-year-old singer Hafia obtained a passport especially for this occasion (luckily, valid until 2031), and for all participants, to come meant leaving behind daily responsibilities, livestock, households, and routines.
Thanks to everyone who helped. Dedicated to our dear friend Ribana, the gathering took the form of her imagined wedding; honouring a presence felt in absence.
