Opalima Kupina. 101 Years forward with Zdanevich. is a lecture-performance by Nikolay Karabinovych with elements of buffonada*. In 1922, after his transit through the Ottoman Empire, the Tbilisi born futurist poet Ilia Zdanevich emigrated to Paris where he performed his Zaum* texts in various café surrounded by the Eastern Europe and Caucasus diasporas. By recounting the texts with surprised slapstick while invoking a music history to map the poet’s displacements, the lecture offers to revive the cabaret-like aesthetic of Zdanevich’s performances. Doing so, Karabinovych describes a potential transnational history of Paris émigrés and uncommon historical parallel following Zdanevich assertive critique of the intelligentsia of old Empires. After all, the Tatlin Tower is the hypertrophied leg of the Eiffel Tower.
* Buffonada is the Ukrainian word for “Slapstick”: a style of humor involving exaggerated physical activity that exceeds the boundaries of normal physical comedy.
* Zaum are linguistic experiments in sound symbolism and language creation coined by Cubo-Futurist poets. It is a non-referential phonetic entity with its own ontology. It’s organized through phonetic analogy and rhythm.
Nikolay Karabinovych (Odesa, 1988) is an artist from Ukraine, currently based in Antwerp, who works across various media such as video installation, performance, sound, and sculpture. He explores the social histories of Eastern Europe, approaching collective and personal memory by means of analytical, conceptual or interventionist tactics.
