Chronoesthetic Rupture

InSAR satellite image, hand-carved willow wood object and flutes, 5D optical data storage, willow-leaf from Kakhovka

2026

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The exhibition environment belongs to a speculative future, exploring how memory and mourning are stored across technological, cultural, and ecological dimensions. At its centre stands a weeping willow—rooted in Ukrainian folklore as a symbol of the cyclical nature of time, memory, and renewal. The work combines inSAR (Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar) data, folklore, and ghost stories to trace willow forests now growing where water once flowed—trees as hauntological witnesses, living archives of violence, resilience, and memory embedded in wounded earth.

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TESTIMONY OF A WEEPING WILLOW

2023

Leaf of a weeping willow tree obtained from Kakhovka, epoxy table On the morning of June 6, 2023, Russian troops destroyed the Nova Kakhovka dam on the Dnipro River in southern Ukraine. The Kakhovka Reservoir, which supplied drinking water to more than 700,000 people in south- ern Ukraine, was drained. The resulting flood caused catastrophic ecological damage, leav- ing the area seemingly barren. The environmental consequences will persist for years, extend- ing beyond Ukraine’s borders. Several months later, weeping willow sap- lings began to emerge from the parched soil of the former reservoir. One leaf, collected from this site, is now displayed on a pedestal. In Ukrainian folklore, the willow tree is seen as the progenitor of the life cycle and symbol of the soul’s resurrection. According to ancient belief, a green willow that has never heard the sound of water possesses the power to pre- serve the ghosts of the past within itself.

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CHRONOESTHETIC RUPTURE

2026

The InSAR satellite image captures four weeks of rapid vegetation growth within a vast forest of weeping willows—the re-emergence of life on the exposed bed of the Kakhovka Reservoir. This technology functions by emitting microwave pulses that bounce off the Earth’s surface, measuring the minute »phase« shifts in the returning signal to detect physical changes at a millimeter scale. Through this invisible in- frastructure of satellites’ remote sensing, the image reveals a burgeoning forest of weeping willows—detected not by the human eye, but through the shifting density of biomass and the quickening of plant moisture. When a dam col- lapses and a reservoir drains, the landscape does not merely revert to its former self; it en- ters a new temporal layer. Through the lens of InSAR, the growth of this forest is rendered as a continuous unfolding—a living surface in- scribing its own image through the competing rhythms of light and decay. The satellite’s radar registers these shifts as subtle variations in signal echoes of what was overlapping with the frequencies of what is becoming, forming a cartography of time itself.

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THE WILLOW FLUTE

2026

Oral history is among humanity’s most an- cient architectures of data—a living storage system where memories are woven into the breath of songs, tales, and the rhythmic repe- tition of narratives passed across generations. The series of hand-carved willow flutes draws from a Ukrainian folk tale in which a tree rises from the site of a silenced life, its roots drinking from the ground of a tragedy. When this wood is shaped into an instrument, it does not sing with a free voice; instead, as breath pass- es through its hollowed core, a untold history emerges—like a ghost carried within its fibers. It recounts what has been erased, and by whose hand. In this tradition, history is not merely record- ed in words; it is inscribed into the very fiber of the material, lying dormant and waiting for a fu- ture listener. Sound becomes the medium that draws out what the willow has retained—allow- ing the past to resurface not as a static record, but as a living resonance, a vibration of collec- tive memory felt in the present air.

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