I Write to You from the Clouds

• In Event: Liminal Place-Making: Peripheral Senses and the Folds of Experience

Abstract

This paper and performance will elaborate on my series of interactive poems “I write to you from the clouds”. The historical genre of hypertext, interactive narrative made up of concise lexias connected with links, originates from poststructuralist textuality in the late 80s and in the post-soviet context is associated with the distant view (“I am a bird, not a tree”, as Madina Tlostanova formulates) on the events past or spaces not within reach. The series touches on the sense of displacement and expresses it by means of interactive writing. The poems were written from July 2023 till February 2024, and the events that they react to is a sensory map of a Russian relocated in 2022 because of the war with Ukraine: the death of Navalny, arrest of a friend in an airport, sense of isolation and the distanced view on the place of immigration. The series was conceived as a story from the clouds, that is, from a flight in an airplane, which, rising above everyday life, creates a meta-level of its perception.

Author

• Natalia Fedorova, Smolny Beyond Borders