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Video
Atlas of Tectonic Landscapes: Through the Eclipse Corridor
Video
Images
The visual sequence unfolds as a series of shifts and overlays. Twilight landscapes, both natural, urban, and industrial, intersect with archival footage of war, military smoke, and scenes of destroyed spaces and human bodies. Among them appear cave drawings, cruising zones, romantic vistas, and swarms of bats, together forming a multilayered geology of memory and fear, in which humanity seems trapped within an eternal corridor of eclipses. The Suprematist forms that cross the sky act as symbolic agents of violence, cold emblems of modernist faith in geometry and the power of form. They cover the solar circle much like ideological constructs cover reality, transforming light itself, the symbol of knowledge, hope, and humanism, into a field of destruction.
The soundscape composed by German composer Christoph Ogiermann intensifies this sense of total tectonic tremor. Its foundation lies in the deconstruction of the Romantic harmonies of Jean Sibelius, which disintegrate into fragments, shift into industrial rumble and metallic resonance, into trembling sound waves that evoke the earth under bombardment. This is the sonic topography of war, a space where music becomes the body of catastrophe.
Among the visual quotations are references to 2001: A Space Odyssey 1 and to the vampiric aesthetics of Twilight. Yet the central nerve of the work is linked to the Futurist opera Victory over the Sun (1913, St. Petersburg; 1920, Vitebsk) 2. It is precisely the contribution of the visual artists involved in the production (above all Kazimir Malevich) that remains the opera’s principal artistic achievement and the reason it entered the history of culture. It was a painterly zaum, a precursor to the ecstatic nonobjectivity of Suprematism 3, wrote Benedikt Livshits about the stage design, meaning that the work on this production served as Malevich’s impulse for the development of the Suprematist concept. What is especially significant here is that Malevich’s most important work, Black Square, first appeared precisely within the stage design for Victory over the Sun (Act 1, Scene 5) 4, as a visual expression of the triumph of active human creativity over the passive form of nature: the black square replacing the solar circle.
Shabohin returns to this gesture not as a celebration of creative power but as a moment of primal perversion within the modernist myth, where the victory over the sun becomes a victory over goodness, over life, over the very possibility of humanism. The modernist project with its faith in rationality and form anticipates the totalitarian political projects of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, from ideologies of destruction to war.
In this context Through the Corridor of Eclipses becomes not a postmodern play with citations but an accusatory act against the entire modernist paradigm and against the belief in form as liberation. The Suprematist figures in the sky do not so much inherit Malevich as expose his legacy. They become shadows, products of the same mechanisms that produced violence and cultural hubris. This film renders war as sensorial, metaphysical, and inevitable, as a natural catastrophe inscribed into the very matter of human history.
Shabohin’s work explores the inner architecture of catastrophe as a force inscribed in the cosmic fabric of time. The “corridor of eclipses” embodies both the external conflict of the region and its inner psychic landscape, where form eclipses light, ideology reshapes truth, and systems absorb life. The video functions as an apocalyptic vision and a record of sacred horror, revealing how culture, in its pursuit of illumination, continually engenders new zones of darkness.
In this sense the work exists at the intersection of media archaeology, post-Romantic melancholy, and the aesthetics of the irreversible. It shows how the avant-garde dream of a “victory over the sun” transforms into a symbol of ending. The video becomes an archaeology of darkness in which the tectonic strata of history, aesthetics, and psyche shift and collide, forming a new mode of sensory experience.
Shabohin constructs a tectonic diagnosis of the region, a chronicle of irreversible displacement in which war, migration, loss, and light merge into a single field of vision. The video operates within the fields of media archaeology, post-Romantic melancholy, and the aesthetics of the catastrophic, demonstrating how artistic thought becomes an instrument for analyzing historical and geopolitical ruptures when visuality itself functions as a symptom of tectonic time.
Footnotes
Mandrake Gardens
Social Marble
Musical composition: SORRY MAM_Tectonics_ Electronic Improvisation (2021–2023), lyrics and composition by Christoph Ogiermann, featuring the voices of the Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart and the participation of MULTIeTUDE 2b, performed and sung by LENsemble Vilnius and released as a concert on platformB within the project Musik der Jahrhunderte
The premiere took place as part of the ECLAT Festival of New Music in Stuttgart [E22.5].
Materials
Size
23’56”
PlatformB, video Atlas Of Tectonic Landscapes: Through The Eclipse Corridor, Germany
Demonstrative Mimicry: 7 Videos in the Basement (fragments), SDK, Warsaw