Stedelijk Studies Journal Issue #12

Dreams are made of porcelain (Really, Really)

by Katherina Gorodynska

January 16, 2023

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While talking about experiences of transition, this essay itself is in a state of transition. It is moving and traveling. Starting as a lecture performance at the Sandberg Instituut, different parts of this essay have been read in Amsterdam during the past months since the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Next to the event Relatively European Relatively Civilized organized by the Second Thoughts collective at W139, it was read at the Decolonial Futures Symposium at Framer Framed and then traveled back to the Sandberg Instituut. Each time, fragments were replaced, characters added. According to the artist Philippine Hoegen, performance can be described as a form of versioning.^[1] With this in mind, this essay is also a performance, a set of tools searching for a language on how to speak about things that have gone missing.

1. There in relation to a here

I want to start with a Soviet game called Sekretiki,^[2] which translated means Little Secrets. Children dig a hole in the ground, throw in everything colorful they can find—blooming flowers, shiny stones, shimmering doll clothes—then place a piece of glass over the pit, cover it with earth, and run away. Only when they feel unobserved, they return, expose the spot again, and view their secret treasures through the glass. Things that were once objects disappear in order to, later, become images. Objects which were not considered as having value for the future were hidden in the present while they remained in a past which sometimes can be a deep pit. I am searching for objects but I cannot find any; I am surrounded by images from somewhere else, by white porcelain without traces of history.

a Soviet game called Sekretiki, which translated means Little Secrets

Thinking of porcelain, I am thinking of white porcelain. I am thinking of my parents selling all their porcelain, books, and belongings at the 7km Market in Odesa before moving to Germany with three of those plaid plastic bags. There was no Pulcinella pincushion doll, no roly-poly Daruma, no first Teddy Bear to find in my family’s new house.^[3] Growing up in Germany, I was missing something which I later learned to call a migrant shelf,^[4] some newspapers on the table no one would have had the time to read, just some useless objects which were nothing more than carriers of memory and history. While Svetlana Boym writes that “diasporic intimacy is possible only when one masters a certain imperfect aesthetics of survival and learns to inhabit exile,” my parents were happy when they could afford to buy new porcelain.^[5] I want to take this white porcelain as a starting point to think about objects without a history, about looking more into a future than into a past.

Thinking of porcelain, I am also thinking of three porcelain figurines which are the only objects they took from my grandmother’s house. Three aesthetic ballerinas with porcelain skin, stretching their legs, are now standing alone on a chest of drawers behind the staircase in a room with big windows facing a small garden with a Japanese maple. They are objects of beauty—fragments of imaginary worlds invited into everyday life, and looking around this room, around this house, they seem to be the only things which remind me of our flat back in Odesa.

In her book Secondhand Time, Svetlana Alexievich recorded interviews she had with people from Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia between 1991 and 2012.^[6] The book, which is an assemblage of dialogues and stories told by ordinary people who usually rarely get a chance to speak, is drawing an oral history of emotions and life during and after the fall of the Soviet Union. One of the characters at one point says, “The only thing we knew about God was that there was no God.”^[7] Like not believing in God, the people were not believing in a future. The only thing they knew about the future was that it would come. Today, I think that precisely this unpredictability of a future made my parents become obsessed with it.

2. Something about the future

Back then, no one traveled from Ukraine, but my farther was a shipbuilding engineer, which in Odesa is the same as a mechanical engineer in Dortmund, and my mother was definitely proud when he brought a suit, a camera, and Toblerone chocolate from overseas. After this, he opened a textile factory at the 7km Market. I used to tell everyone that it is called 7km because of being seven kilometers long, until I realized that this is not true, but it still does make a good story; seven kilometers of chewing gum next to counterfeit shirts, next to some flower wallpapers for your bedroom and laminate for your kitchen floor. Once, after been given one of these friend’s journals where you were asked to write down your favorite dish, your favorite song, and your dream, I wrote behind the semicolon for dream: Travel to Paris. Now, as I again try to visualize a possible Little Secret, I suddenly see a photograph of Paris lying there. An image of the Eiffel Tower behind glass being found in a courtyard of a house in Odesa.

Many years later, my parents started to travel to Italy, later also to Spain, and today they also travel to Vietnam and Thailand, but they never wanted to go back to Ukraine. One time, I persuaded them to take a train to Ukraine. It was the time of the Orange Revolution. Arriving in the city which I grew up in, four years after our migration, I was sitting in a restaurant and suddenly realized that the menu they brought was in a language I did not understand. Growing up with Russian being the language we spoke, I was confronted with a reality I did not know about, on the one hand, and with cultural changes, on the other, from which I was physically detached. Coming from Odesa, I did not know that there were large parts and regions in Ukraine where people spoke Ukrainian. At some point I ended up typing Ukrainian souvenirs into my computer and finding an article on a website with the name: culture trip – unique trips with care for the world, something you usually would visit as a tourist searching for a good café or restaurant in a city like, for example, Lisbon. Arriving in Germany as an eight-year-old and being asked if I am Russian, I did not really know what to answer. Sometimes I would have said yes, and sometimes I would have said no.

It was considered more modern to speak Russian, the only way, and to learn French, to dream up a story which is happening somewhere else, where you could finally become something that—to follow this logic—mostly meant to possess. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the people were split in half. In between, the ones afraid of losing a utopia which was already gone for a long time; others were happy to finally, maybe, be able to become part of the market which was hidden from them for such a long time. But what connected all of them was a “dizziness of freedom,” a feeling of vacuum and a fear they couldn’t really get rid of, and trying so hard is sometimes not helpful at all.^[8] There, not here, life would be easy, simple.

Georges Perec starts his book Things: A Story of the Sixties with a whole chapter which consists entirely of a description of an apartment the main characters of his novel imagine to live in. “The eye, at first, would glide over the grey carpet of a long hallway, tall and narrow.”^[9] The reader does not get to know the main characters; instead of dialogues and names there are only descriptions of rooms, of furniture someone wants to have, maybe lighting that would accompany it in a nice way. Imagining yourself in an apartment which does not yet exist is an act of creating a virtual space. While a place has a smell, a touch, and sounds, this virtual space is only accessible to sight.^[10]

Maybe our virtual house has a big leather couch, a TV, some indirect lightning but no carpet (for sure no carpet; who, really, still has a carpet?), a wooden table, plants (different cacti, an orchid), white leather chairs in front of a big kitchen island, white chairs around the table, another TV. Superficially, it might seem easy to interpret a world where there are so few elements. Only behind the closed door of an overcrowded fridge, I suddenly picture these huge jars with self-made pickled cucumbers; sometimes there are also some with pickled tomatoes or pickled cabbage. Even here, in this house, you cannot flee completely from telling a story.

3. Something about the future so that we first have to take a look into the past

In the podcast Kitchen Conversations, in which Patrycja Rozwora proposes an alternative space to think about the “diverse region of so-called ‘Eastern Europe,’ with all its complexities, histories, cultures, traumas,”^[11] Hristina Tasheva talks in one episode about her experience of migrating from Bulgaria to the Netherlands: “I now will try to work as much as possible, but one day, it will be different. One day, I will become the person I want to be; one day, I will have the house I dream of; one day, I will have the job I dream of… but life goes on, and for many people this one day never comes.”^[12]

I want to tell you a story about Polina. When asked about her favorite Ukrainian food, Polina doesn’t know what to answer. She usually would tell this story which she thinks already tells a lot. Black olives have been her favorite food as a child and this, somehow, already illustrates that the kitchen she knows from Odesa is somehow more close to a Mediterranean kitchen than to something she would consider as traditionally Ukrainian, and somehow, she doesn’t know why, Polina is also a bit proud of this fact.

Why does knowledge always move toward the East and not from the East?

Every time Polina’s mom, her name is Svetlana, would meet new people she would tell them about her daughter’s excellent French. She would tell that she, her daughter, always helps her classmates and even moderated the new year’s celebration at school in French. No one would ask why; at elementary school in Odesa, children were supposed to learn French in the first year, but did not have any Ukrainian classes. The story which remains will be a daughter being good in French, having all the potential to become something, which in the case of Polina would mean to study somewhere else. Repeating this story again and again makes it easier not to look at the fact that it is not easy to become someone else, even if you move to Germany and become excellent in German within three months, having at least experienced how to learn in a Ukrainian elementary school. Repeating this story again and again makes it also easier not to look at the question: Why the hell are you working so hard (seven days a week) on becoming someone else? She doesn’t really understand why people always tend to ask her if she is missing it. Missing what? Sometimes she would say yes and sometimes she would say no. In this story, Svetlana is just a fictional character drawing a mark on a thing. For her, white walls were a great achievement of modern design, and to be honest, it somehow made her proud, as if she had understood something. Today, she can’t talk to these people anymore, it is like they don’t share the same language. I mean, they do have these Russian-speaking neighbors who were building their house next to them and they really decided to build it with columns in front, can you imagine? And she doesn’t want to even start thinking about how it looks from the inside. Missing what? Sveta, please! How can we help you? You are doing a good job, almost like a hand coming up and coming out of the grave, you are reaching out of fiction, I feel connected to you. Were you surprised that your daughter has never heard about Holodomor,^[13] or about Babyn Yar?^[14] How should she, if the Ukrainian history was never ever part of any education, neither in Ukrainian school nor in later German school, and if you also never ever told her about this?

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I want to come back to the idea of looking and living with the past through objects. Let us imagine a dusty attic. It is a place the sun rarely visits, maybe there are some boxes lying around in a corner. In her book In Memory of Memory, Maria Stepanova takes the event of her aunt’s death to sift through an apartment full of faded photographs, old postcards, letters, diaries, and heaps of souvenirs.^[15] While writing a multifaceted essay on the collective nature of remembering through the lens of a Russian Jewish family, Stepanova’s journey starts in a dusty attic and ends with the notion that there is maybe nothing to find there, that there is not such a thing as one collective story one can tell through some objects found in a house. What, really, can a single object tell us when it is brought out of context and if there is no person who can tell you a story about it? And what if you suddenly realize that some of the stories you’ve been told were simply not true? While searching for objects and Little Secrets which might be found under glass, I switched position without noticing and suddenly it was me lying there and watching what was happening around me the whole time. Suddenly, I realized that next to the objects which were missing in our house, also my family and myself were missing in Ukraine. After the very short and small glance into the cultural changes starting with the Orange Revolution when I was fourteen, my parents never returned to Odesa. But I did many years later, two years before the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine and while the war in the east of the country was already ongoing for a long time. I was not there when the uprising started; I never participated in it, I never learned the Ukrainian language. While I am finishing this text it is now already nine months since the full-scale Russian invasion, and today I am asking myself: Who would think of nostalgia now in Ukraine? Who, really, still wants to listen to these Russian songs? Which past are we looking back to when we refer to concepts such as reflective nostalgia or critical melancholy, if different stories from different times, different stories in different regions at the same time, would give insights into different realities? How can we deal with the feeling of detachment when spelling the city you grew up in with one s instead of two, something you just recently learned?^[16] There are so many other things to learn, to change. Today, I am again starting from zero, in solidarity with the people who are losing their houses, who are losing their belongings and objects—we are once again looking into a future.

Dreams are made of porcelain (Really, Really)

About the Author

Katherina Gorodynska (*1992, Odesa) is a graphic designer, writer and cultural programmer working between Cologne and Amsterdam where she currently finishes her MA at the Sandberg Instituut, Gerrit Rietveld Academie. She is part of the artistic direction of the literature and performance festival auftakt in Cologne and works on the intersections between publishing, writing and performance. By mixing personal memories and observations with appropriated texts and found footage, her work materializes in polyphonic assemblages spanning over different media and searching for a language on the edges between private and public as well as biographical and fictive.

[1] Philippine Hoegen, ANOTHER VERSION: Thinking through Performing (Eindhoven: Onomatopee, 2020) Cahier 0, 8.

[2] The first time I read about this game was in an article written by Ukrainian-German author Sasha Marianna Salzmann in Neue Züricher Zeitung on February 26, 2022, where she refers to the book The Museum of Abandoned Secrets by Oksana Zabushko (Seattle: Amazon Crossing, 2012). Later, I came across this game in a book by Maria Stepanova, In Memory of Memory (London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2021), 343.

[3] These are three objects Allen S. Weiss writes about in his book Unpacking My Library, or, The Autobiography of Teddy (Berlin: K. Verlag, 2020). He finds them while preparing to move into a new house together with a library of 10,000 volumes.

[4] Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 327–336.

[5] Ibid., 336.

[6] Svetlana Alexievich, Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets (New York: Random House, 2016).

[7] Ibid., 876.

[8] Vilém Flusser, The Freedom of the Migrant (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 4.

[9] Georges Perec, Things: A Story of the Sixties (Boston: Godine, 1990).

[10] I refer here to the text “How to talk about things that have gone missing?” written by Charles Esche in School of Missing Studies (Amsterdam: Sandberg Instituut/Sternberg Press, 2017), 14–26. He talks about the Renaissance perspective as one of the starting points of Western modernity and compares the concept of a space (especially from the perspective of art spaces) with that of a place.

[11] Patrycja Rozwora, Kitchen Conversations.

[12] Hristina Tasheva, Kitchen Conversations (July 17, 2020).

[13] Holodomor, also known as the Terror-Famine or the Great Famine, was a man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine from 1932 to 1933 that killed millions of Ukrainians.

[14] Babyn Yar is a ravine in Kyiv and the site of massacres carried out by Nazi Germany’s forces during its campaign against the Soviet Union in World War II. The first and best documented of the massacres took place on September 29–30, 1941, killing some 33,771 Jews. In total, between 100,000 and 150,000 people were murdered at Babyn Yar during the German occupation. For more information, see Nick Axel and Nicholas Korody, eds., Babyn Yar: Past, Present, Future (Leipzig: Spector Books, 2021).

[15] Maria Stepanova, In Memory of Memory (London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2021).

[16] Odesa is the translation from the Ukrainian language, while Odessa comes from Russian. I refer here to the lecture “Ukraine Through Decolonial Lens,” which I organized together with the collective Collect4Ukraine at the Sandberg Instituut on October 27, 2022. Yulia Krivich and Anna Creszta were invited as speakers.