First decolonial detective agency

Information

2021

Inspired by a fragment from Philosophy, a novel by the Russian futurist poet Ilya Zdanevich, artist Nikolay Karabinovych has created the Opalima Kupina (Burnt Bush) Detective Agency, which investigates the history of the Jewish community in Turkey, the boundaries of the Pale of Settlement, and other migratory processes.

The Opalima Kupina (Burnt Bush) Detective Agency launched in 2021 in Kyiv. It was founded not by a single detective but by a team of secret service employees from various Warsaw Pact states. It also employs other experts in the field of detective work: artists, psychologists, analysts, lawyers, and IT professionals. Of course, there are detectives on the books. Kyiv is not the only city where they work.

The geographical focus of the agency is the 41st parallel and the 30th meridian.

The agency is investigating a number of episodes that took place from 1859 to 1922. Its goals include the integration of different histories; a review of the notions of “the global South,” “the East,” and “the Pale of Settlement;” the development of an agent network; and the presentation of its activity in the form of exhibitions.

Georgy Narbut, St. Sophia Cross. Illustration from the magazine Lukomorye, 32, 1914

State Public Historical Library of Russia, Moscow

Here are some of the key words people use most often when in contact with our agency:

Frightening discoveries, erasing obstacles to display;
Overcoming social distance;
Export ban on the produce of the empire;
Various kidnappers;
Which artifacts should be returned to whom?;
Work by an anonymous artist;
Doubling meanings;
Assimilations and hybridisations;
The eerie erotic.

Opalima Kupina. 101 Years forward with Zdanevich. is a lecture-performance by Nikolay Karabinovych with elements of buffonada*. In 1922, after his transit through the Ottoman Empire, the Tbilisi born futurist poet Ilia Zdanevich emigrated to Paris where he performed his Zaum* texts in various café surrounded by the Eastern Europe and Caucasus diasporas. By recounting the texts with surprised slapstick while invoking a music history to map the poet’s displacements, the lecture offers to revive the cabaret-like aesthetic of Zdanevich’s performances. Doing so, Karabinovych describes a potential transnational history of Paris émigrés and uncommon historical parallel following Zdanevich assertive critique of the intelligentsia of old Empires. After all, the Tatlin Tower is the hypertrophied leg of the Eiffel Tower.

* Buffonada is the Ukrainian word for “Slapstick”: a style of humor involving exaggerated physical activity that exceeds the boundaries of normal physical comedy.

* Zaum are linguistic experiments in sound symbolism and language creation coined by Cubo-Futurist poets. It is a non-referential phonetic entity with its own ontology. It’s organized through phonetic analogy and rhythm.