Masha Godovannaya’s research project employs the critical potential of hauntology for an artistic conceptualization of the founder of necrorealism, Evgeny Yufit.
Masha Godovannaya’s field research focuses on her creative interaction with materials collected by film director, artist, and co-founder of the parallel cinema and radical art movement necrorealism, Evgeny Yufit (1961–2016) in his studio in St. Petersburg. Following the logic of hauntology, Masha Godovannaya delves into the archival ephemera, necro-artifacts, legends, and traces of the underground culture of Leningrad/St. Petersburg of the 1980s–2010s left by Yufit, where the ghosts of the recent past and the shared present serve as guides to a future that never came.
The work of Yufit, one of the key figures in late-Soviet unofficial art, has often been the subject of research by art historians and film specialists, but never before using such a biographical approach. Being in a unique position with regard to Yufit’s legacy, Masha Godovannaya seeks to describe and systematize the director’s archive, the contours of which emerge in numerous photographic, film, and video materials, early manuscripts, drawings and sketches of book projects, photographic documentation of performances, and behind-the-scenes footage of films and other spontaneous artistic actions imbued with the aesthetics of black humor and the grotesque.
Godovannaya’s artistic practice involves the consistent development of the genre of the film essay, in which she compiles visual and sonic elements and autoethnographic, archival, and documentary sketches into dense affective narratives. Seeing her interaction with Yufit’s archive as a creative task, Godovannaya plans to intuitively document the processes of systematizing, describing, and attributing her findings by resorting to various film and video formats. This footage, as well as interviews with necrorealist artists and Yufit’s relatives and film and video footage from the family archive, will form the basis of a biographical film-essay.
