Maria Stepanova is an internationally renowned author, poet, essayist, journalist and editor in chief of the online publication Colta, born in Moscow 1972. Minnet av minnet (2019) reached a Swedish audience in 2019 and is a sweeping novel about the silence of memory, Russia and Soviet Society, in the literary lineage of Proust and Sebald. These themes are explored in the newly published poetry collection Kroppens återkomst.

For Uppsala International Literature Festival Stepanova will be speaking with us virtually from New York with Ida Börjel. She translated Kroppens återkomst with Nils Håkansson, from which she will also be reading. The program is part of the exhibition Promzona by Pavel Otdelnov, one of Russia’s most acclaimed contemporary artists. “Promzona” means “industrial zone” and in the project Otdelnov explores his own family history- a proletarian dynasty tied to secret chemical plants in Dzerzjunsks, where the manufacturing of chemical weapons and beauty products took place until it’s closure after the fall of communism. The exhibition collects archive material, witness statements, videos, installations and paintings.

Otdelnov and Stepanova share a similar search for the biographical and “Heimat” as point of departure for their work. However, their interpretations bloom into further reflections of cultural memory, the Soviet system of victim and offender, utopia and dystopia. Otdelnov wrote about the project: “stories, as my Grandma remembers, resemble fairy tales. My project is about forgetting, about how historical events become myths, how nature reclaims what humans create. Trees penetrate concrete and destroy buildings. Soviet history, a myth in itself, slowly becomes ancient ruins- without ever existing. It is paradoxical how testimonies lose their credibility, they become molded by general understandings and slowly become what we call history.”

Ida Börjel is one of our most praised contemporary Swedish poets. Börjel has received the Katapult Prize for her debut Sond (2004) and her latest collection Ma was nominated in 2014 for the August Prize. In 2021 she was awarded the Börjel Region Skåne’s Culture.

The conversation is in partnership with Uppsala Art Museum.

Language: English
Saturday 26 March 13.00-14.00
Uppsala Konstmuseum