SOLID AMID / reading list for the project
Photo / Anna Zavoyazova
The list of books for the project Solid Amid emerged simultaneously as a point of entry into the research and as one of the forms of its connection to place. The work was first shown at the National Library of Yamal, and each of the elements of Solid Amid was indexed and linked to specific books from its collection.
I made the decision to present the work specifically in the Library, because there, positioned between the bookshelves, it became a kind of portal to connect to different forms of knowledge: by using an index with book codes, the viewer could immerse themselves in particular aspects of the project by ordering a book right there, in the Library. At the same time, the number of books in storage—not only on the open shelves—is so vast that the already extensive list could have been many times longer. Perhaps, in the extreme sense, inexhaustible—just like the very nature of attempts to describe a phenomenon through text. Like the permafrost to which the project refers, knowledge exists as a visible interface and at the same time as an inaccessible, ungraspable phenomenon, capable of manifesting itself in different forms depending on the interaction with it.
I approached Olga Alekseevna Smirnova, an employee of the National Library of Yamal, and told her about the idea of the project and its connection to sources. Olga prepared, in my view, an outstanding document—a reference list with a selection of literature for each element of the research. I would like to present this list here in full: both as a functioning document that can be activated—literally by ordering any of the mentioned books when visiting Salekhard—and at the same time as a fragment of the project’s archive, a kind of souvenir.
From the extensive list, which I reproduce here in its entirety, several books were randomly selected for the GES-2 Library. These works correspond to each element of the sculpture Solid Amid, which resembles a drilling rig, and the objects on its axes refer to human attempts to interact with permafrost. On the metal framework there are nine artifacts forming a vertical axis, numbered from 1 to 7, as well as objects 0 and 00, serving as a prologue and an epilogue, the points of beginning and end of the vertical.
As the point of contact with permafrost, I chose a strip of abandoned field within the city limits of Salekhard—a former experimental agricultural station from the 1920s. The field appears like a hallucination in the nomadic landscape of the tundra, where such a form of settled life is unviable, unreal. Objects 1 and 2 begin the narrative from this place.
Objects
1. Field. Obdorsk
Hanna Zubkova in dialog with Valentina Palamarchuk / Solid Amid 2024-2025 / GES-2 / photo Vadim Stein
Copy of a photograph. Experimental field, Obdorsk (present-day Salekhard), 1929. From the holdings of the Yamal Experimental Agricultural Station. State Archive of the Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug.
2. Field of Vision
Hanna Zubkova in dialog with Valentina Palamarchuk / Solid Amid 2024-2025 / GES-2 / photo Vadim Stein
Video with 3D scanning of the ruined infrastructure of the Yamal Experimental Station, which in the 1920s protected plants from climatic impacts and today resembles the skeleton of an ancient creature.Video with 3D scanning of the ruined infrastructure of the Yamal Experimental Station, which in the 1920s protected plants from climatic impacts and today resembles the skeleton of an ancient creature.
Books
Alexandra Molchanova, The Polar Farmer
The book tells the story of Dmitry Chubynin—a meteorologist and “pioneer of polar agriculture” who sought to develop agriculture in Yamal in the 1920s–1950s. The scientist’s biography, written on the basis of archival materials and manuscripts collected by his daughter, intersects with the Soviet ideology of mastering the North and reflects the transformation of an agronomic experiment into an instrument of symbolic colonization of the Arctic.
Zimogor. Memoirs of N. I. Chernykh and His Scientific Articles
This publication is devoted to Nikolai Chernykh, an agronomist and head of the Yamal Agricultural Experimental Station, whose research promoted ideas of the “happy” development of the North. His works on land reclamation and greening exemplify a characteristic Soviet discourse associated with the transformation of nature, where scientific rationality is combined with a utopian promise of future abundance.
Chingiz Aitmatov, Mother’s Field
Chingiz Aitmatov’s novella is an allegorical drama about the female experience of life during war and loss, where the figure of Tolgonai unites maternal sacrifice, diligence, and a connection to the land. The work presents peasant labor and suffering as a universal moral experience; the field becomes a metaphorical image of memory and the renewal of life, while female resilience emerges as a cultural and political resource.
Objects 3 and 7 address other forms of attempts at sedentariness on permafrost. Of course, its mobility and instability contradict the construction of long-term infrastructure. However, the drive to develop territories for resource extraction pushes toward the search for pragmatic solutions to adapt construction to lands poorly suited for this purpose.
Objects
3. Pile Field
Hanna Zubkova in dialog with Valentina Palamarchuk / Solid Amid 2024-2025 / GES-2 / photo Vadim Stein
A concrete pile, oriented with its cone upward, represents a system created to combat the ground, which remains frozen for most of the year, and at the same time resembles an idol emerging from it.
7. Terra Firma
Hanna Zubkova in dialog with Valentina Palamarchuk / Solid Amid 2024-2025 / GES-2 / photo Vadim Stein
A piece of permafrost extracted from a borehole in the field. As part of the cryolithozone, it represents an environment in which water can simultaneously exist in three aggregate states—ice, liquid, and vapor. At the same time, being part of the Earth’s crust, permafrost appears as a firm ground on which it is possible to organize a sufficiently long-term existence.
Books
Viktor Remizov, Permafrost
The novel describes the construction of the “Great Stalin Railway,” built in 1949–1953 by prisoners between the Urals and the Yenisei. The story of several families becomes a metaphor for the confrontation between human beings and nature, combining epic narrative with the documentation of memories of violence that accompanied the development of Siberia.
Andrei Platonov, The Foundation Pit
The novella models the utopia of collective construction as a space of loss. The expanding pit is a symbol not only of the future “house of the proletariat,” but also of the endless grave into which the project turns. Voshchev and other characters embody the internal crisis of the subject under conditions where the ideology of progress is inseparable from the technology of death.
Stanislaw Lem, Solaris
This science fiction novel questions the possibility of communication with something radically other. The ocean of the planet Solaris generates “guests”—materialized traumatic memories of the researchers. This circumstance turns the space expedition into a psychoanalytic drama. The project of knowledge becomes a mirror of human memory and guilt, and “contact” with the alien results in the impossibility of going beyond the limits of human experience.
Objects 4 and 6 concern scientific ways of contacting permafrost, attempts to represent and map the invisible.
Objects
4. Field. Salekhard
Hanna Zubkova in dialog with Valentina Palamarchuk / Solid Amid 2024-2025 / GES-2 / photo Vadim Stein
Video documenting electrical resistivity tomography of the internal layers of the experimental field in Salekhard, 2024.
5. Electromagnetic Field
Hanna Zubkova in dialog with Valentina Palamarchuk / Solid Amid 2024-2025 / GES-2 / photo Vadim Stein
An object composed of layers obtained through the modeling of electrical tomography data from the experimental field. The electromagnetic field is created by currents introduced into the ground through metal rods—electrodes—in order to study subsurface structures. In the installation, each layer is placed on a separate plate, literally reproducing layers of earth, and yet together they form a coherent image only if the viewer chooses the correct angle of view.
6. Reverse Side of the Water Mirror
Hanna Zubkova in dialog with Valentina Palamarchuk / Solid Amid 2024-2025 / GES-2 / photo Vadim Stein
Video from a camera lowered into a hydro-borehole in the area of the experimental field. The “water mirror” is a term used to describe the upper boundary of an underground aquifer where the liquid is at rest. Measurements in boreholes help assess how underground waters may affect permafrost layers.
Books
Andy Weir, The Martian
Andy Weir’s novel is a science fiction variation on the Robinsonade, whose protagonist is forced to turn Mars into a “laboratory of survival” relying on engineering knowledge. The book combines techno-optimism with a situation of extreme isolation, and the extreme conditions of space serve as a metaphor for a subject existing within a logic of continuous crisis management.
Objects 0 and 00, located at opposite ends of the vertical inside the sculpture, address two seemingly polar points in the spectrum of possible forms of knowledge.
Object
0. Ground level. Isolation
A fragment of an insulating or casing pipe used in drilling boreholes. Its purpose is to protect the walls during the formation of the opening and to prevent liquid from upper layers from entering the deep source.
Book
Viktor Karpov, History of the Creation and Development of the West Siberian Oil and Gas Complex (1948–1990)
The monograph traces the formation of the largest oil and gas complex in the USSR as a key node of industrialization in the late socialist era, showing how political strategies, social changes, and scientific-technical solutions shaped a new fuel base for the country. The focus is on the role of party-state institutions in organizing the “industrial explosion” and the tension between nationwide priorities and regional specificity.
Object
00. Peak. Ngani ya
“Ngani ya” is translated from the Nenets language as “foreign land,” where “ya” means “land.” The object—a souvenir keychain made of mammoth bone—is a sign of mass consumption in a symbolic field where the transition occurs from a sacred world to a commercialized equivalent of tourist “wandering in foreign lands.” The ornament depicted on the keychain symbolizes the Sun among the Khanty people.
Books
Andrei Golovnev, Speaking Cultures: Traditions of the Samoyeds and Ugrians
An ethnographic description of the cultures of the Nenets, Selkups, Khanty, and Mansi, based on many years of field materials. The idea of “speaking cultures” reflects the author’s role as a mediator, allowing tradition to speak about itself through the categories of war, ritual, time, and space. The text continues a line of interpretations in which “authenticity” appears as a product of scholarly mediation.
Galina Kharyuchi, Nature in the Traditional Worldview of the Nenets
The monograph describes the ritual and worldview system that connects the Nenets with their environment. Extensive lexical material emphasizes the linguistic dimension of ecological conceptions. The work belongs to a tradition of studies that describe “nature” simultaneously as a sacred and a normative order.
Antonina Syazi, Ornament and Object in the Culture of the Khanty of the Lower Ob Region
The first systematic study of ornamental practices of the northern groups of the Khanty. The author is not only a researcher of the tradition but also its bearer. This circumstance makes the book both a scholarly work and a reflection of personal experience.
Yuri Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North
In this book, Yuri Slezkine analyzes the history of representations of the “small peoples of the North” as part of the formation of Russian self-consciousness. Arctic Mirrors shows how power, science, and literature transformed figures of the “alien” or the “last aborigine” into symbols of civilizational imagination. The study problematizes binary schemes of colonialism, offering a more complex vision of mutual transformations in the context of cultural otherness.