Maya Kust | ‘Dreams About Earth,’ 2022 Dissolving Earths II

Life on our planet is an infinite variety of phenomena that exist in close relationships, in fact often merge, with each other. Dreams About Earth invites the audience to reflect on permafrost through fragments from conversations and collective imaginings that happened in Yakutsk in the winter of 2022. Collective artist Maya Kust invited participants to connect with the “underlands” through sensing, hearing, feeling, seeing, and playing. These encounters are included here in the form of a script performed in three acts woven from imaginings and fragments of discussion, conversations with researchers, stories heard from grandmothers, reflections during walks through milky mists, memories of memories, and rare winter dialogues with strangers. “The dream takes place in timelessness. Gradually voices are waking up—these are voices that have always been there, that are there at this moment and that are going to be here in the future.”

Dreams About Earth probes at the collective landscape, opening new routes to speculative communication, for participants to be with and sense the permafrost below their feet. Partially reproduced and documented here, the fragmentary online programme acts as an acknowledgement of the impossibility of translating personal and somatic relationships with this land to a remote, international audience.

“…The sounds of the world flicker on the snowy expanses of the frozen river: the chest hum of the wandering wind, the crunch of snowdrifts, the rare flapping of wings of a raven, the howl of a fast snowmobile, the exclamations of children rolling down the hill. Listening to these streams, at some point you suddenly begin to hear a transparent voice of the Earth coming from everywhere—from the sky, from the movements of the water, the trees, the glistening of small whirlwinds, from afar and nearby…”