Ekaterina Shapiro-Obermair: Performing Histories And Identities

Vienna’s contemporary art scene often feels like a meeting point for biographies that do not fit neat national labels, and our conversation with artist, curator, and researcher Ekaterina Shapiro-Obermair makes that friction visible. From her studio in Vienna, she traces how being born in Moscow, migrating through Germany, and building a life in Austria produces layered identity rather than a single stable category. That matters in artistic research, because when we ask who is “speaking” about Ukraine, Russia, or Europe, we are also asking what privileges, blind spots, and responsibilities travel with the speaker.

Her long-term work around Lviv begins with chance and intensifies with history. A formative trip in 2010, shaped by performance work across Eastern European cities, left her with a sense of tension in Lviv’s public space, especially around Second World War monuments and memorials. After 2014, the need to understand how war reshapes narratives becomes urgent, leading to an extensive collaboration and field research that asks a deceptively simple museum studies question: if a Museum of War were built in Lviv, what would it look like? The answers reveal that monuments and memorial sites gain meaning through people’s actions, not through stone alone.

This is where performativity, cultural memory, and commemorative rituals become a powerful lens. Ekaterina describes public gatherings as unwritten scripts: who speaks, which music is played, how bodies move, and why certain dates matter. Those repeated choices teach communities what counts as history, and they quietly organise belonging. Language is central too, because inherited terms carry ideology. Tracking phrases, slogans, and narrative roles exposes how historical memory is shaped, distributed, and policed, especially in post-Soviet space where competing pasts coexist in the same square.

A striking thread is the clash between heroic myth and victim testimony. In Western European memory culture after the Holocaust, the moral frame often turns on witness, perpetrator, and complicity. In Soviet historical imagination, the key opposition remains hero and enemy, producing a vocabulary that struggles to name victimhood without converting it into sacrifice. Ekaterina points to a ceremony where Holocaust victims are praised as heroes, not because grief is absent, but because the available narrative demands triumph. The result is emotionally sincere and politically loaded, showing how a society’s “usable past” can narrow even the language of mourning.

Her practice also moves beyond documentary film into objects, drawings, and works on paper that function like visual poetry. Childhood images of tanks and sausages reappear as “Panzerwurst”, connecting private memory to present militarisation and propaganda. She returns repeatedly to children and adolescents because they echo what adults circulate but refuse to say plainly, revealing the collective subconscious of a culture. A film made in Birobidzhan, the Jewish Autonomous Oblast, shows students adopting a Jewish narrative without being Jewish, a precise example of identity as performance shaped by place, funding, and institutional storytelling. Across all these works, the question remains: when lived trauma hardens into abstract myth, who gets to use it, and to what end?

Transcript

Vienna Time And The Mission

Liudmila Kirsanova 0:02

Hi, it's Vienna Time with Ludmila Kirsanova. For my podcast, I interview artists who live and work in Vienna, a place both grandly old and vivaciously young. Whether my guests were born here, chose, or happen to be here, I'm keen on giving voices and sharing stories of very different artists belonging with different traditions and generations. I do gravitate towards profound interviews rather than sketches and brief questionnaires, and that's why you'll find here in-depth talks embracing both professional and personal insights. Considering my curatorial practice, I've been meeting extraordinary artists and witnessing wonderful art projects that no doubt will go down the history. And now I'm eager to share it with you to give an inside look at the local art scene, which is as vibrant and diverse as personalities creating it. Let's explore and celebrate it together.

Meeting Ekaterina In Her Studio

Liudmila Kirsanova 1:11

And today, my guest is Ekaterina S hapiro- Obermair. Hello, Katerina. Hi Ludmila. We are currently sitting in Katerina's artistic studio, which just a different door of the off space that she curates together with her partner, which is called Horst. So it's just you take a different door and you find yourself in a studio with a nice fireplace. And I mean it's a little bit colder April in Vienna, so we have a fire next to us, we have warm coffee, but our topics to discuss today will be rather cold. So Katarina is an artist, curator, and researcher who works with many complex political topics. And let me first introduce you shortly. So you were born in Russia, and then you traveled to Germany to start your education, and in Nuremberg, you studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, and then you moved to Vienna, where you studied in the University of Applied Arts, and then you accomplished your PhD research in the Institute for Art Theory and Cultural Studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, which happened in 2022. Research takes a huge part in your artistic practice. And your doctoral study, which then was also made as a book, you dedicated your research to the spaces and situation of post-cold war. And in particular, you studied the city of Lviv in the Western Ukraine, where you studied the places of commemoration of the Second World War and how they are organized as a places, as a memory places, as a places of cultural memory, as a places of performing rituals, and how this rituality, performativity around the memory shape the identities in that particular space in that particular region. And the title of the book is performing history. It's already a very complex point to start. And maybe we will start with this book with your PhD research because it's also a source from which your very important for your body of work film was made, which is called De facto. Before we talk about performativity in history, which is a very big and interesting topic to discuss.

Living With Multiple Identities

Liudmila Kirsanova 4:13

First, I would love to ask you a question about identities. Because you work with Ukraine, you work with the current situation of terrible war between Russia and Ukraine, you work with aggression of Russia towards Ukraine, you work with contemporary Ukraine, you research the identities in Ukraine. From which position, from which identity do you approach this research? Because your personal background is quite diverse. You were born into one culture, then you migrated and embraced a different culture. How do you identify yourself? How do you identify yourself as an artist? And do in your cases these two identities overlap? From which identity, from which position do you perform your research and your artistic critique?

Ekaterina Shapiro-Obermair 5:17

No, thank you for asking me this question. I'm also thinking a lot about this. How I see it right now, that actually each of us has multiple identities. Probably in my case it's more obvious, but each of us experienced it more or less. Yes, as you said it correctly. I was born in Russia, I was born even in Moscow, and I identify myself at the same time as Russian and as not Russian, because I left Russia 1998. For me, it feels strange to introduce myself as Russian because I need immediately to add that, but I'm not living there anymore for more than 30 years, which is a really a major part of my life. I'm uh Austrian, but I'm also not an Austrian, so I'm both. I have an Austrian passport, but of course, if I'm talking to someone who was born somewhere in Voralberg, so they feel the difference. I have many other identities. For example, we came first not to Austria, so my family came to Germany as refugees, and I identify myself as both as a migrant and also not migrant because it happened so many years ago. So I don't feel myself as the one who has some structural disadvantages. Because usually, if you talk about this experience of migration, you refer to some moments of exclusion, to some moments of being structurally discriminated. So I cannot entirely exclude it because of course I'm still I still have this migrant background. If I would have been born in Austria, it would be different. But I'm totally in a privileged position compared to some other people who have uh a stronger experiences of uh being refugees, or when this experience is more recent than my experience.

Why Lviv Became The Focus

Liudmila Kirsanova 7:10

And when you started your research about Ukraine, what did trigger the interest?

Ekaterina Shapiro-Obermair 7:18

Yes, actually, you started to talk about my dissertation, which was a very important project in my life, but it came uh in a different uh direction. So first I did the film De facto, and it was a result of a collaborative project with the historian Alexandra Wachter. And out of this film I was able to write a theoretical work. But uh, before me and Alexandra have uh started this project, which was called Lviv Museum of War in 2015, I was for the first time in Lviv in uh 2010. This first time it came really by chance. I became a part of a group of performers who were working on staging Heine Müller's play Volokalang's Highway. And actually, that was their project. I just joined them because I was interested in the topic, and uh I joined them in the last minute, and it was uh a lucky moment for me, but unlucky moment for another person, someone broke their leg, so one person couldn't join this group, so it was one spot empty, and I could just step in. And it's also interesting how these uh small coincidences uh change uh lives of people because for me this trip to Lviv in 2010 became very formative. We traveled not directly to Lviv but through several other Eastern European cities, also to Bratislava, to Krakow, to Kyiv, to Smolensk, and some others, also to Minsk and Orsha. But in Lviv I felt something special. I felt a certain tension, and as we were working on this play, which is dedicated to the first months of German invasion of the Soviet Union. We were focused on the topics of memory of the Second World War. I was more sensitive to these aspects of the city life, and uh in Lviv I felt the strongest tension towards these questions. It was impressive, so I had in my mind that I want to do something. So my first idea was to do something with monuments, because especially the monuments dedicated to the Second World were under pressure, but not as strong as it came out later. When the war started in uh 2014, I was really deeply shaken. And this moment, this interest really to understand what's going on arose. I proposed Alexandra that we can start a collaborative project together, and uh she joined me and we did really an extensive research in uh Lviv from 2015 to 2017. Our first idea was a hypothetical question that uh in Lviv a museum dedicated to the Second World War would be built, and we were asking different people how such a museum could look like. And but through this question, many other questions appeared. On a certain point, I realized that the meaning of monuments exist only in interaction with people, so how people deal with them, how they act in front of them, and not just what the monument proposes to be. So the film de facto is around this question, but also my PhD thesis.

Positionality And Speaking From Somewhere

Liudmila Kirsanova 10:45

Did it come out of this responsibility to understand and to respond to it as a Russian person? This interest with which you arrived, which position did you start? So did you articulate yourself as a as a Russian person who comes to figure it out? Or did you come so this is my question. From which position did you do this research? With whose eyes did you observe the situation? Because of course the observer cannot be the neutral observer. You bring your own background in any research you do.

Ekaterina Shapiro-Obermair 11:30

Yes, of course. Uh and of course, I was uh introducing myself every time I was uh conducting interview or meeting people, and my introduction was as uh I am an artist or researcher, depending on which stage of the project it was, uh, based in Vienna, but I was born in Moscow, so I was not hiding this. Um, as you saw the film in uh Lviv, there were really many diverse groups. So it's not true saying that there were only Western Ukrainians and no other communities were living there or were active or were visible in public space. So we're also a Jewish community, there were also a Polish community, there was also people who were mourning the Soviet past, uh, who were gathering uh in different places and they were allowed together, so they were not uh there were some tensions, but uh the city was open to everyone. It was a very pluralistic city at this moment. One thing I would to add uh to the identity, it was like the first question that actually your identity defines itself always uh in uh relation to a person whom you are talking to. So if I'm talking to someone from Austria, I might be not an Austrian. Or maybe, but if I'm coming, for example, with a person from Austria to China, we both are acting as Austrians. So it's always a situation-based. So it's not something which is stable. It depends on context, it depends on uh situations, it depends on your opponent.

Liudmila Kirsanova 13:03

I'm sorry, and maybe it feels like I'm a little bit stuck with this question, but maybe the last one before we jump to performativity, really would like to understand is it important for you? So we as spectators of your artworks, of readers of your research of your text, is it important for you that we understand your personal background and identity? So when I watch your film de facto, when I read your book Performing History, is it important for me as uh your spectator and reader to understand that you were born in Moscow, that you migrated to Western Europe, and that already being based here, you were triggered to start your research about Ukraine first with your travel to Lviv and then with the beginning of the invasion. So, do you want us to understand your identity?

Ekaterina Shapiro-Obermair 14:04

For the film, I think it's not that important because I think the film speaks by itself. That was actually the aim of the film. For the book, I explain uh my background at the beginning because it is important to understand from which perspective I am speaking. And this perspective it has uh advantages and it has disadvantages. It has disadvantages that of course I'm uh I was not born in Lviv. Probably I misunderstand some local context, so I don't want to exclude these. But it has an advantage that I'm less involved. That uh for me it's easier to take not neutral position, but for me it's easier to observe without being really involved. So I can observe various groups without being attached by any of them.

How Commemoration Works Like Theatre

Liudmila Kirsanova 14:48

Let's then maybe talk about performing histories and about your film de facto because you show us something very, very interesting about rituality in cultural memory. May I ask, how do you understand this idea of performativity in history?

Ekaterina Shapiro-Obermair 15:16

What I did is uh I look at the commemorative rituals so and understand when people gather together to commemorate publicly some event from the past. What does it mean? And uh try to understand the principles of their assembly. So who is speaking, which music is played, how do they move, on which dates are they gathering? Because all these elements are not given, they are established in a way, and uh they are following a certain script which is not necessarily written. In most of the cases, it's an unwritten script, but people know how to act, they know what to do. And uh this is like one thing which I'm analyzing, trying to understand how these performative acts are related to their ideas of the past and how these how they communicate their ideas of history or of certain historical events to the group. So in many cases it's something which serves the confirmation of certain ideas. So we gather here to commemorate the beginning of invasion of fascist Germany over the Soviet Union. And I'm also analysing the language, so the speeches. Which language do people use to express some historical thoughts? Because it's also not neutral. So we all use language which was established by others, that's clear. And it's interesting to trace the sources, the terms.

Myth Heroism And Soviet Memory

Liudmila Kirsanova 16:52

Now, when you're talking, it's very interesting about this rituality that even without written down or articulated scenarios, people know what to do and how to move. It of course brings us to the idea of a myth, to an idea of mythology, because I think mythology is very important for rituality, right? Because it's all again a story which is open to interpretations, but the core idea of a story stays fixed, like in a myth, right? But then you can branch out, and then also if we talk about mythology in the core of this performativity, would you think that this core idea lies in the in the figure of a hero, in the idea of heroism?

Ekaterina Shapiro-Obermair 17:46

Every history is based on mythology. It does not mean that the things did not happen, they did, but every society selects uh which uh events are important, so that's why they create uh a hierarchy of events, and this is a point where we can speak about mythology. And uh this idea of uh heroism of heroes, it was very common before the Second World War, and it changed afterwards because of the experience of the Holocaust. But in the Soviet Union this shift did not happen. So it's while in the Western European or American countries the whole understanding of history of living together was based since then on antagonism between witness and perpetrator or an opportunistic witness. In the Soviet Union, the antagonism between hero and enemy was still the crucial one. And I don't want to say that the one is a proper one and another one is the wrong one, because a major part of the Jewish population who which perished in the Holocaust, these were Soviet Jews, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Russians as well. Of course, uh Soviet people perished and they found uh different strategies how to deal with these losses.

Naming Holocaust Victims As Heroes

Liudmila Kirsanova 19:24

And uh in the in your film de facto, you have a very interesting moment when you show us an um an old gentleman who is reading a poem apparently he had composed for the victims of Holocaust, and he speaks about them as heroes. He shows us that he doesn't possess a vocabulary to talk about them as victims and apply these Soviet lens to talk about them as heroes. Can you please expand on this?

Ekaterina Shapiro-Obermair 20:07

Now, this uh moment of the film is one of the central moments because we see the ceremony dedicated to the memory of the Holocaust victims, and we see a man, so it's difficult to say how old he is, something about 70, and he reads a poem which he composed by himself, and this poem is aimed to express his moaning to the people who perished. But as you said, he is not able to name them as victims. He can only name them as heroes who dedicated their lives that we can live happily and in peace now days. And this is one of the most interesting moments to me, and it's a very kontradictional moment. It was essential for me to develop my theoretical framing. So, this poem expresses very clearly their idea of a Soviet novel where we have a hero, and this hero experiences different challenges, external or internal, when he struggles with himself to achieve something. And at the end, he wins. So he does not necessarily stay alive, but even if he dies at the end or is killed, he's still a great example for the following generations.

Liudmila Kirsanova 21:39

About performativity in history.

The Sleeping Museum Of Overlapping Time

Liudmila Kirsanova 22:00

Spent his last months where he died, and the house before had belonged to an aristocratic family. And uh you show us a guided tour, which you film. We don't know if the person who is making a tour is she aware of your filming. It's like kind of uh this shaky camera that comes maybe secretly, we we are not sure. And then she guides us through this museum, and it's a very interesting place of overlapping histories. This lady she performs a tour where she tries to bring these histories together because she makes remarks about how it was in Lenin's time, how it was in a time when it belonged to an aristocratic family, and there this lady who belongs to a third time herself, and then it's kind of we get into this performance which is about time, about many different times, about many different stories, but suddenly when it all comes together in your video, you create as an artist for us a feeling that we in a place where no time is. You fascinatingly put us in a space where you feel like it's a time of endless sleep where no time exists. It's really incredible how you artistically created for us this feeling of losing the feeling of time.

Ekaterina Shapiro-Obermair 23:39

This film it was edited 2015, but the film material is from 2014 and it was a very specific historical moment. I was in April 2014 in Moscow because I was invited for an exhibition project which was a collaboration between uh the Memorial Society in Moscow, which was entirely forbidden, I think last week, and the Jewish Museum in Vienna. And it was accidentally that uh it was on this extremely specific historical moment. It was horrible how excited and happy people were because Krimea was an ext. I felt like it uh probably how the beginning of the first world war was felt in the cities that people were really engaged in these political events. It was for me very crucial to experience the city in this situation, and I thought as I'm experiencing a historical moment, I should collect as many evidences as possible. I took extremely many pictures during this trip. And uh I also filmed a lot, and one of these filmings was in this museum. So I went there per purpose. But of course, I did not expect this situation. But when I saw this woman, I started to film. It was, as you said, it was not hidden, but it was not very obvious. But it's not that unusual that people film guided tours, so probably she was not that surprised. And it was, as you said, an extremely specific atmosphere in this house. This house belonged before not just to some uh aristocratic people but to Marozovs. They were one of the main Russian metens, one of the founders uh of Pushkin Museum. And uh then it was expropriated by Bolsheviks, and uh Lenin spent there his uh last year. He was ill and he died in this house. So the house itself witnessed two extremely important figures for Russian culture, for Russian history, and uh it buries the memory of both narratives. And it was interesting to visit it, especially in 2014. And uh I was the only visitor, so it was not uh that popular.

Liudmila Kirsanova 25:56

You woken her up from some sort of sleep, but the whole house has an impression of like a sleeping kingdom. It's like this. I don't know how you made it, but you feel it, it's like all sleeping. We are kind of in a some, you know, really like enchanted castle or something where everything is sleeping, and then you woke up for us, this god of the sleeping objects, and you know, and she's guiding you through, and she's saying, everything is original. So she also emphasizes that although they are all sleeping, coming together of these different histories, and I did know that you filmed it in 2014, which adds like one more layer, one more history, one more momentum of uh the history. And it's just when I think now it's uh a layer of uh pre-revolutionary Russia with this luxury and uh collecting art and investing in art, and invited the very famous architect Shachtel to create this big mansion, and then you know, to cover every luxury up with white canvases and to put in the leader of the Russian Revolution to work to die there and then to preserve everything, and then you come in 2014 and you film this sleeping place when the next huge chapter in the history is happening right now. Also from the guiding tour, it seems like the whole political conflict of this place it's it's not articulated. So this lady, you do not understand. She's telling the story of the house being very calm. So she she doesn't emphasize the conflict of times, the conflict of situations. So she takes it as uh as it is. It's also makes me think about will it also someday be taken from what we are experiencing right now? Because in her speech it becomes very abstract because it's so far away. So these polarities of the stories they kind of naturally come for her together in this place, and she's talking about this brilliant Mason English bathroom where his body then was balmed, and you know, so it's like this, but in her way of talking, it doesn't come in any conflict. So she's amazed that uh Marozovs brought this exquisite mason porcelain to wash their faces, and it's okay that Lenin died there and he was bound in this bathroom and then transported to Moscow. So it's like this two she's very calm about these two events happening in the same place, so it's really makes me think about how time and distance and forgetting and maybe really all transform in some abstract ideas which then come in a in a collage, which are not that uh conflicting anymore. I was really because she's so uh she's so natural and she can be amazed about both things, about how rich and you know, with high taste they were that they did, but also like that uh this the watch was stopped and his body was prepared here. Like both things are equally important for her and equally fascinating. I really love how you describe this piece. Because it also, you know, when I watched this video narrated, I also thought about how when it, you know, with time, how this uh history really becomes this myth, how we just taught. And then, for example, this lady with her guided tour, she performed this history in the way where this collage is so you know brilliantly coming together, and you can you you you don't need to take a position, you do not need to choose, you do not need to see a conflict, it's just it can coexist together, and then you end up you switch off your camera when she says in a very like this little bit bored voice, and this is it, and then you stop your camera, and you know, and this is it, like now live with it, and just and but we so far we haven't touched on other parts of your artistic practice because no because not only filming, not only research, not only writing, you also do objects, you also do drawings, you also do painting.

When Objects And Research Converge

Ekaterina Shapiro-Obermair 31:06

This uh part of my practice is much more complicated to talk about because they're not this historical narrative. There isn't if there is a theoretical framework, it's very different. Uh so for me it's also always the most complicated question if people ask me, and how do you correlate these two parts of your practice? Because but you do. I do, and sometimes uh so the most happiest moments for me as an artist is are when these two fields are coming together. For example, last year I had an exhibition in Proarte in Hallein, and they managed to develop an installation and to include a video into it, and for me it worked out very well. So, I, as you said, I work a lot with objects but also with uh works on paper. And I consider especially the works on paper more as poetry. And it's uh if you speak about poetry, it's not that easy to describe it in words and also especially visual poetry.

Liudmila Kirsanova 32:07

Still, sometimes I think what you research, what you film and your objects they come together. For example, in 2023 you did a series of Panzerwurst where here you can see it.

Ekaterina Shapiro-Obermair 32:21

I was uh collecting the images which I drew as a kid in kindergarten, and these were tanks and sausages, and uh then uh formerly they suit perfectly together.

Liudmila Kirsanova 32:35

It's uh like fished out of this childhood drawings from kindergarten. So what you drew as a child in kindergarten, yes, and it was uh 80s, right? It was eighties in Moscow, and you drew uh tanks and sausages. Yes. Uh-huh. So but also I think what what kids draw, it's a little bit maybe also a part of our collective subconsciousness over the. Right, because they they do what's very directly, what's on their mind, what people are talking about, what they see around them. It's very interesting that you were drawing tanks and also just so then you kind of dig through your kindergarten archive, and you took these two repetitive symbols and you put them together.

Ekaterina Shapiro-Obermair 33:31

Yes, but this work is not about my kindergarten memories, but uh because it I think it speaks more about our contemporary situation, but uh this is where this image is uh coming from.

Childhood Rituals And Learning War

Ekaterina Shapiro-Obermair 33:45

Probably two important points. What I'm interested in are kids and uh adolescents. So in several of my works you see really like young people because it's exactly what we were talking about right now. That young people talking directly about what the society is not talking about, or not in that direct way. They are the most sensitive part of the society because they really adapt their ideas they have around them, they found around them, they're not seeing them critically, they are just repeating in most of the cases. They're repeating what they hear in their families, what they hear from other media. It's one point, and uh another point about my own biography. I grew up in Moscow and uh I used to live in the Soviet Union before, and I talked to until 1991, and I talked to friends of mine who are five years younger and they cannot remember Soviet Union anymore. I think I am like the generation which still remembers. I remember very well, yes, because I went through these uh Soviet institutions, I was in a pioneer camp, I was uh, and I was like the last generation of pioneers. I went through all these rituals, so we learned how to march. But I think people in Russia are still learning how to march. But uh for me it was very surprising to realize that people, my colleagues from Austria and Germany, they cannot march. So for me, I think if I if people will awake me at night and say you should march, I will do it without any problems. And we yeah, we were prepared for war as kids. But then I also experienced uh this uh period of Russian history which is uh uh evaluated extremely ambitiously now this 90s. So we left Moscow 1998, so with uh uh accidentally it came with this uh financial crisis, which also was uh an important mark. I have never lived under Putin, so uh we left Russia before, but I went through these very specific periods of Russian history while being in Russia. And you said that you often address young people, uh kids, and teenagers in your artworks, because like we just now uh discussed it. It's very interesting that maybe how they talk, how they imagine it's our collective subconsciousness because they do not filter it how we filter as adults, right? It's more like they give you back what is talked around, what is stocked in the family, what is stocked, what is the agenda, right? What is the space, the atmosphere, and the society.

Birobidzhan And Performed Jewishness

Liudmila Kirsanova 36:30

And in 2017, you made a video with you, it will be alright.

Ekaterina Shapiro-Obermair 36:35

Yes, I did this uh film in Belbajan. It was actually uh idea by Simon Mraz to bring contemporary art to this very specific geographical spot in Russia. I'm not sure if everyone knows uh where is Belbajan. Belbaijan is a Jewish autonomous oblast in Russia. It uh lies very very closely to the Chinese border. It's one of the remotest places in Russia. Simon had this idea and he invited some artists. The specific thing about Belbaijan is that it was uh established as the Jewish not state but oblast even before the foundation of Israel by Soviets. It was uh founded in the late 20s. So the Soviets were very eager to define the Jewishness as nationality. And they had a definition that only peoples who have their own land can have a nationality. So that's why it was important for them to establish some lands for Jews. And then they established these Jewish autonomous regions, which exists since then. And Jewish people indeed moved there of very rural, very difficult living conditions. They also did not escape Soviet repressions, but people who moved there of course uh survived Holocaust, so they were saved by being there. In the 90s, as this opportunity for Jewish people to leave Russia to Israel or to Germany arose, many Jewish people left Belbajan for some other places, so there are not too many Jewish people there anymore. But the funny thing is that uh the region itself claims to this autonomy because as long as they have their autonomy and do not uh unite it with some other regions, they have more fundings and they claim their Jewishness without being Jewish. But and what I did there, I went there to a regular school for children with a deepen learning of Jewish language and culture. And it was very interesting because kids which were attending this school they were not Jewish by their family background, so they were coming from other backgrounds but not from Jewish backgrounds. But then they started to adapt this narrative of being Jewish, and this so this work is about this. Uh so how the kids are talking about Jewishness, about Jewish history, and it's uh and how they identify. How they start to identify themselves. Uh they know that they're not Jewish, but somehow they feel as they would be.

Liudmila Kirsanova 39:21

Very impressive because you show us how the this big narrative, how this memory of the place can affect the understanding of uh ourselves and kind of this embracing, adapting, and sort of absorbing the cultural memory of the space can influence the way how you perform yourself, how you identify and present and manifest yourself.

Identity As Choice Under Pressure

Liudmila Kirsanova 39:52

Yes. Coming now back to the very beginning of our talk when you said that identity is a very flexible notion that it cannot be fixed, it always depends on with whom you speak, where you are, and now we are coming back to this that it's really a construction that so much under different influences and it's not also sometimes what we can deliberately choose, because these kids they were put into this situation, right? It's also something that the space, the cultural memory dictates to embrace.

Ekaterina Shapiro-Obermair 40:39

Yes, and I think so. Also coming back to another moment of our conversation, I think Ukraine is a very interesting example. For example, there are families, many families, uh where especially in Western Ukraine, where one part of the family was in the Red Army, another part of the family was involved in the liberation struggle. And then people choose. So then they choose what kind of uh the family history they prefer to identify with, but this choice is of course influenced by the cultural surrounding where they are now, also with Jewishness. Uh it's uh not only a question of birth, it's also a question of choice. Uh so you can identify yourself with or you can decide not to identify yourself with how I see it. Katrina.

From Lived Trauma To Abstract Myth

Liudmila Kirsanova 41:30

But if it all comes to this sleeping castle where everything comes into this extremely strange collage, which doesn't work for us, but maybe would work for generations coming. Do we want to keep this history vibrant? Again, when I was watching your film de facto, I realized that some of your protagonists are still within the narrative of feeling the trauma very on a human scale, the trauma on a almost body scale. And then the younger your protagonists are, more abstract it becomes, more it it becomes less about people and more about ideas. And this is a very interesting what I was thinking about while watching different films and just your portfolio and your and your body of work. How then these very personal struggles and challenges and experiences that we live through, which we really experience with tears and nightmares and physical and mental pain, then crystallizes in some sort of abstract ideas, then to be clutched for certain of a mythology about the time we lived in. And that's what uh I think your body of work is about. That's my interpretation, the way how these very personal stor because in one interview you even write, I'm not about personal storytelling. And then you film for us this very real people, you know, and then you see how these very personal experiences are being transformed into these abstract ideas, then to become so far that even being completely mad to be together, they still kind of form sort of this madness of the past.

Ekaterina Shapiro-Obermair 43:55

Thank you so much for being such an attentive and sensitive. questioner. It was a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you.