Vera Danilova & Maksim Gabdeev: ”Station YE5: Presentation and discussion of a documentary film.”

Station YE5 is an art and research project by Vasily Sumin exploring the layered heritage of Soviet modernism and its lingering presence in the village of Nizhny Arkhyz, in the Russian Caucasus — home to the Special Astrophysical Observatory of the Russian Academy of Sciences (SAO RAS). Centered around the monumental six-meter telescope built in 1975, the project investigates how the technological and ideological visions of the Soviet era continue to shape the landscape, memory, and identity of this unique place.

Blending anthropological inquiry, archival research, and artistic interpretation, Station YE5 unfolds through a series of installations — an audio walk where inanimate objects such as telescopes and stars engage in imagined dialogue, and a spatial video essay that reconstructs the stories of local inhabitants intertwined with the remnants of Soviet scientific ambition.

By merging fact and fiction, science and myth, Station YE5 raises questions about how we remember, interpret, and narrate the past in the absence of a stable archive.

Commentary by Vera Danilova, postdoc at the Department of History of Science of Ideas, who grew up at the Observatory, and Maksim Gabdeev, postdoc in astrophysics, Institute of Physics, Pavol Jozef Šafárik University, Slovakia

Rausing Room, 6-3025, English Park Campus, No registration needed.