LADA Screens: Alisa Oleva – Online Screening

Biography

Alisa Oleva is a Russian artist living and working in London. She treats the city as her studio and urban life as material, to consider issues of urban choreography and urban archaeology, traces and surfaces, borders and inventories, intervals and silences, passages and cracks. Her projects have manifested as a series of interactive situations, performances, movements scores, personal and intimate encounters, parkour, walkshops, and audio walks.

“I have never made a film before. I have rarely made any visual documentation for my projects. Usually, my documentation results in some ephemeral traces, bits of audio, pieces of paper with notes and maps, or some objects found in the streets. However, due to the pandemic, Walking Home had to transform from a one-to-one physical performance in Istanbul (in which I would be meeting a participating woman and sharing a walk with her to a place she feels like home in the city), into a distant, one-to-one simultaneous walk over a phone conversation. This fragile connection over distance; the footsteps we were sharing at the same time; the sound of breathing heard through a phone; the few photos we exchanged as we walked; these things held the performance together and allowed those ‘walking home’ journeys to happen. 

So, somehow, I felt the need to add some visual presence, some feeling that our feet could meet and walk next to each other in some way, across distance. The video could help to mark those footsteps as we were putting new places on the map – voicing the issues and feelings around the concept of home for women in modern day Istanbul. For each of the walks, footage was made of both my legs and the legs of the participating woman as we walked in London and Istanbul respectively. In the end I chose to put those videos next to each other, marking the moment of walking together and figuring out where it is that feels like home. Instead of the soundtrack, each video has some snippets of our conversation, discussing the concept of home, how it has changed during our lives, whether home connotes safety, and how women’s position towards the home is changing in Turkey. Some participants preferred to stay anonymous and some preferred their voice to be changed. 

The film you will see is the result of putting together all of the 32 walks that took place with the 32 women in Istanbul. Walking Home has no narrative and just rolls from one walk to the next. Therefore, I suggest you might want to watch it step by step, tuning in and out, coming back to it from time to time. It will be available to watch for two months. “

Alisa Oleva

 

Walking Home is produced with the support of British Council’s #WomenPowerinCulture Grant Scheme, in a collaboration between Performistanbul and Live Art Development Agency.