DARIA GNATCHENKO
Daria Gnatchenko is a Paris-based artist and curator currently pursuing a Master’s degree in Ecology of Arts and Media at Université Paris 8. Her practice spans digital media — photography, video, 3D graphics — as well as exhibition-making and writing.

Daria’s work explores ecology, posthuman perspectives, and the “hacking” of habitual notions of the human in the world. Recent projects focus on the idea of connection and coexistence — between people, nature, technology, animals — and on states of fluidity in identity and gender. She often returns to the theme of loneliness, not only as a painful condition but also as a fundamental and even generative aspect of human existence.

Her recent research examines installations that incorporate earth as a medium and the concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk, using these approaches to envision posthumanist worlds and reflect on the temporalities of catastrophe and the end of the Anthropocene.

Her method combines research and visual experimentation, weaving personal experience into contemporary philosophical and cultural discourses. Through this approach, Daria seeks to create spaces where fragile yet resilient forms of life and thought can emerge.

For all inquiries, please contact via email or Instagram.

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CURATORIAL PROJECTS

ART WORKS

PHOGRAPHY / VIDEO

Speak Volumes

2025
SPEAK VOLUMES brings together seventeen experimental films and video art works into a triptych that reflects on history, place, and subjectivity. The program unfolds as a journey through different registers of memory, tracing how images show what endures, what disappears, and what returns.

As Avery Gordon writes in Ghostly Matters, ghosts are signs of unfinished presence — what was meant to vanish but never did. Haunting makes visible how trauma, injustice, and loss endure in gestures, language, dreams, and memory. The works in this program approach memory as something alive, reshaping both personal and collective histories.

The first section, When History Returns, opens with works that address the persistence of historical traces and the ways cinema re-inscribes them anew. Here, images mythologise, allowing erased or spectral presences to step back into the present. Testimonial voices, ghostly figures, and sculptural gestures act like alternative archives, turning film into a medium through which history’s absences can be both witnessed and transformed.

The second section, Haunted Grounds, turns toward landscapes of displacement and erasure. Borrowing from Marc Augé's concept of “non-places” and Deleuze's notion of “time-images,” these works explore spaces stripped of identity, carrying the echoes of those who once inhabited them. Demolished neighbourhoods, fragile architectures, and digital terrains become sites where memory resists disappearance. In such geographies, absence is a generative force, opening constellations of images where time stretches, collapses, and repeats.

The final section, Private Echoes, shifts to the language, family archives, and personal gestures. Here, memory emerges through retellings and revisions, striking a balance between absence and presence. Whether through children’s voices, home footage, or the thermal residue of everyday life, these works ask how personal memory resonates beyond the private sphere and reveal their political dimension.

Taken together, these three constellations suggest cinema as a space where memory is never fixed. It breaks apart and recomposes, moving through time as both trace and transformation. SPEAK VOLUMES invites viewers to inhabit this unstable temporality, to attend to what official memory excludes but which continues to shape the present.

cinéma Out of the blue (9 Rue Saint-Maur, 75011 Paris)
13 September, 2025

Exhibition website https://www.projetbetula.com/speak-volumes