E-flux Podcast

Brian Kuan Wood talks to Daniel van der Velden of Metahaven (Vinca Kruk and Daniel van der Velden) on the occasion of their exhibition at e-flux titled Turnarounds. Turnarounds consists of the film installation Hometown (2018), a new series of textile pieces, and an essay in e-flux journal. Hometown focuses its ultra-wide, hypnotic gaze on two cities—Beirut and Kyiv—that merge into a fictional home for the film’s protagonists, Ghina Abboud and Lera Luchenko. Fluorescent, lava-like animations alternate between images of industrial estates and overgrown gardens as Ghina and Lera lyrically describe the town. A caterpillar gets killed, but while mourning the loss, both evade responsibility for the crime. With their monologue in Russian and Arabic colorfully subtitled in English and Ukrainian, they eat ice cream. Their laughter solves puzzles, and there is a sunken city inhabited by adults who forgot what children taught them. The script of Hometown draws on a genre of Russian children poems called perevortyshi (