Darja Lukjanenko: How to make rockets disappear

How to make rockets disappear is conceived as an invitation to revise the ideas of Cosmism, a 20th century movement, through collective exercise practice based on human imagination. This project follows from the interdisciplinary research on the Cosmism and explores the possible ways of its transformation. In her creative work, the artist employs in particular intangible media and genres, such as performance, performative instruction, guided meditation, etc. The project aims to oppose the values represented by industrial exploration of space: patriarchy, verticality, the cult of power, and materiality. It creates a platform for collective action, interactivity and non-linearity, defined as a contemporary medium, and offers to the readers various ways of expression.

______________
Darja Lukjanenko is a Ukrainian artist engaged in modern art, photography and illustration, and a graduate of the UMPRUM Studio of Photography I. She has focused on confrontation of rockets and the Cosmism movement since 2020. Since 2022, she has mapped the processes of decolonization of Ukrainian culture and documented the Russian war in Ukrainian contemporary mythology. She comes from the city of Dnipro in eastern Ukraine. During the Soviet occupation, Dnipro (formerly Dnipropetrovsk) was a closed city with a secret rocket industry. Like many other Dnipro citizens, Darja Lukjanenko’s grandparents worked in the secret rocket-manufacturing plan and were forbidden to leave the region to prevent disclosure of “rocket secrets”. In the year when Darja was born (1994), Ukraine signed a nuclear disarmament declaration. All parts of the nuclear missiles from Dnipro were dismantled and buried under a plot of land on which a sunflower field was planted.

Darja Lukjanenko’s bachelor thesis, which served as the basis for the project How to make rockets disappear, is available at: https://vimeo.com/592157191.