Fräulein Talents: Lesia Vasylchenko

In my work I’m looking into how time and temporalities can be politicized, how time or duration could be used as a military strategy or for weaponization. I’m also looking into the politics of speed acceleration and the politics of slow violence. So it’s a lot about speed and slowness, past and the future, and the manipulation of time.

I’m asking how history is being written, what is being montaged out, what’s the role of photographic image and what is a photographic image today? When it comes to politics of time, for example, in Chronosphere, I’m talking about a slow violence. Slow violence is a term by Rob Nixon. It describes a destruction that is unfolding over time.

You can’t see it as a result straight away. Slow violence is happening over time and this time is longer than we could perceive. It’s about the consequences of disruption by war, the destruction of cities, the pollution it causes – we’re smaller than this. So I’m trying to question what is our position in between all of this.

When I won the prize, I said that I will use it for donations. For me, it was important to not take any money from Pinchukar Center. And it was a very fast decision because I didn’t expect winning anything there. So I donated one third to Hospitaliere, it’s a medical organization that is helping soldiers. The second third I donated to Kozhushko Foundation, which was founded by a father of a very young girl who has died. She was not just an artist but also an activist – very interesting young person that would have done amazing things in the future. She applied for Pinchukhar Center but then she was killed by explosion rockets and her father started the foundation to support young artists like she was.

It was a very emotional moment because I didn’t know how to transfer the money but I found the phone number of her father online. I called him and my voice was shaking because I didn’t know what to say. I was like, your daughter has applied but I won this prize and I want to give plenty. And then he started crying on the phone and invited me straight away to be there in the committee for these young kids. Then I gave the rest of the money to the military and I felt like so good because at least I did something meaningful. Since I’m not based in Kiev right now, for me, it’s important to contribute as much as I can. So, for example, if somebody is giving me a platform to have an exhibition, I will be talking about Ukraine. And I always will be saying there is still war. And if I have any money coming from exhibitions, I’m donating straight away. It’s kind of a duty.

I have an intuition about something that I want to say in my work, and then I try to figure out how to say it. Whether it will become a video, a collaboration with scientists, or an object. I start from a feeling I want to experience while making the work or when it is finished, and then I watch how it comes to life. Along the way, I do a lot of research so that every layer of the work has a reason behind it and nothing is random. Every material is connected to something.

Through this research, I reach a point where I understand what I want to say. Then I realize that, for me to express it, I need to place all these elements into a different constellation to create a new meaning.

I could write a very long text, but sometimes creating a new word explains the idea more clearly. I ended up writing it mainly for myself as a way to put everything together and clarify what I want to say.

I was looking into predictive technologies and became obsessed with questions about what the future is, how it is constructed, and where the idea of the future comes from. It is not only that people imagine the future, this idea emerges from social and political conditions.

You can suffer now or have nothing now because everything is oriented toward what comes later. In this sense, the future can be a privilege and is often connected to class. It is also very local. In wealthy contexts, conversations focus on museums, life extension, and pharmacology, all future-oriented ideas. Meanwhile, many people are focused on how to survive in the present, so large parts of the world live in a very now-oriented reality. I became interested in predictive technologies because this relationship to the future has been technologized. These systems learn from the past, analyze patterns, and produce projections of what could happen, which we then react to in the present. Instead of a linear past–present–future sequence, the order becomes past–future–present: the projected future arrives before the present and shapes our actions. This shift in linear time fascinated me. The future appears before the present, we act in response to it, and only afterward does it become reality. This idea connects to the concept of Tachyonic Data, which emerged from the video. A tachyon, in quantum mechanics, is a hypothetical particle that could travel faster than light. Since nothing is known to move faster than light, I used this idea as a metaphor for information that appears before it happens in human reality. For example, satellite technologies analyze imagery of a territory and generate images showing how a landscape might look in the near future.

These images resemble photographs, yet photography traditionally documents the past. If an image shows a moment that has not happened yet but looks like a photograph, what is it? Perhaps, within computational systems, the event has already occurred even if, for us, it has not happened yet. The work therefore explores this delay between human time and technological time. The difference between where we exist as humans and how time operates in machine or artificial systems.

You can suffer now or have nothing now because everything is oriented toward what comes later. In this sense, the future can be a privilege and is often connected to class. It is also very local. In wealthy contexts, conversations focus on museums, life extension, and pharmacology, all future-oriented ideas. Meanwhile, many people are focused on how to survive in the present, so large parts of the world live in a very now-oriented reality.

I became interested in predictive technologies because this relationship to the future has been technologized. These systems learn from the past, analyze patterns, and produce projections of what could happen, which we then react to in the present. Instead of a linear past–present–future sequence, the order becomes past–future–present: the projected future arrives before the present and shapes our actions. This shift in linear time fascinated me. The future appears before the present, we act in response to it, and only afterward does it become reality. This idea connects to the concept of Tachyonic Data, which emerged from the video.

A tachyon, in quantum mechanics, is a hypothetical particle that could travel faster than light. Since nothing is known to move faster than light, I used this idea as a metaphor for information that appears before it happens in human reality. For example, satellite technologies analyze imagery of a territory and generate images showing how a landscape might look in the near future. These images resemble photographs, yet photography traditionally documents the past. If an image shows a moment that has not happened yet but looks like a photograph, what is it? Perhaps, within computational systems, the event has already occurred even if, for us, it has not happened yet. The work therefore explores this delay between human time and technological time. The difference between where we exist as humans and how time operates in machine or artificial systems.

Time is deeply connected to perception. I try to expand this idea beyond human perception toward other forms of time, such as technological time or the time of a signal, which exist independently of human experience. I am interested in how time can be used as a tool of violence within the human realm.

It can function as torture when you do not know when something will end or when something will happen. The uncertainty itself creates suffering, for example when people do not know when a war will end. Another example is the disruption of circadian rhythms. Research by forensic architecture has shown how prisons in the Middle East manipulate day and night cycles as a method of torture. Night attacks, such as those carried out by Russia, also weaponize time. Over time, this disruption affects people not only mentally but physically through the disturbance of sleep and daily rhythms.

There is also slow violence, where territories are destroyed in ways that make them unusable in the long term. Some military strategies operate through this kind of deep-time thinking, where the goal is to make a place uninhabitable over time. At different levels, duration itself can become a tactic. The disruption or rupture of time and lived temporal experience can be used as a weapon and as a form of violence directed toward both humans and their environment.

When synthetic data is collected, the question becomes what is actually requested or extracted from it. A dataset can contain information about many things: the size of a bean, moisture, temperature, material composition, or chemical elements in water such as lithium. All of this information exists, but often only one aspect is extracted, for example air moisture, while the rest remains unseen. So the question is whether this information is truly visible or known.

There will always be large amounts of data, but what matters is who asks questions of it and what is left behind. How is the data stored? Is it possible to return to it later and extract different knowledge? This also depends on where and how the data is stored, who controls it, and who owns it. Whether it is private, governmental, or open source. These questions around storage are important because we usually extract only a small part of what exists, while the remaining data could reveal much more but is never accessed. If it is not stored or accessible, it effectively disappears.

This is why I am interested in OSINT and open-source intelligence practices. They are becoming more accessible and are developing tools and platforms that work with these questions: what is preserved, what is revealed, what remains hidden, and how such data can be used not only by data analysts but also by architects, researchers, investigators, or lawyers.

For example, referring to Narcissus immediately communicates a meaning because people understand the story behind the figure. By using such references, you can express complex ideas through a single association. It becomes a way of understanding and explaining what is happening. The more I engage with technologies that are not my field, the more I rely on these connections. I perceive them metaphorically rather than technically, and language becomes the tool that helps me make sense of them.

I am fascinated by imagining how other things perceive the world around them. I use the language of montage and film to explain this to myself. Humans perceive the world at around twenty-five frames per second, but I wonder what that would be for a bird or a butterfly, or even for a building or a city. How does time pass for something more solid or non-living?

I know it’s a question I will never have a clear answer to, but I am curious to develop my imagination enough to at least picture how things change and exist differently around us. I think about this often. I realize that I do not fully have the capacity to imagine these perspectives, and this troubles me because I want to understand them but cannot. My work grows out of this inability to comprehend different temporalities coexisting at the same time and scale.

Even if it is impossible to fully grasp, I try to visualize and place micro and macro scales together to explore what kinds of relationships appear when different experiences of time exist side by side.

Usually my work is very controlled and not focused on experimentation, but in this process I allowed myself to let go more. I worked with images that already exist around me instead of creating entirely new ones, and this experience of letting go became important for me. I feel that I might want to move closer to functionality rather than research and documentation, because I feel happier working in a speculative realm than within strict research. This is something I want to continue exploring and see where it leads in the future. I was unexpectedly relieved by this new format, writing a story, making drawings, and working in an environment that does not describe the world as it is now, but instead reflects a world that we might live in in the near future.

The best outcome would be for viewers to realize that other scales of time exist around them. That there are very small and very large temporal scales, some very long and others very short. Where a person places themselves within this depends on their background.

Yes actually. While working on the exhibition, I came across a term in a book about forensic architecture and investigative aesthetics. In a chapter discussing perception and imagery today, I encountered the word Chronosthesia, which I had not seen before, and I began researching it. I discovered that the term is mainly used in psychology and refers to the cognitive ability of the human brain to travel in time. The capacity to remember the past, imagine the future, and exist in the present simultaneously.

It’s described as a form of mental time travel. This fascinated me because time travel is usually understood through science fiction or popular culture, where technology allows movement through time. However, in some non-Western contexts, time travel can exist without technology. For example, in a story by Octavia Butler, a woman travels through time through memory alone. I began thinking that experiences such as PTSD or dissociation could also be understood as forms of time travel, because a person may physically exist in the present while reliving a moment from the past. From there, I moved to planetary infrastructures and the environment. Networks of synchronized satellites continuously observe the planet and deliver data twenty-four hours a day. In this sense, they are constantly seeing the world. Because this data is stored, the system forms a continuous memory, and predictive analytics allow it to analyze possible future developments based on past observations. Henri Bergson wrote that the present is shaped by memory of the past. We understand where we are only because we already recognize the world around us. Similarly, planetary infrastructures exist through what they remember; by storing what they have seen, they can predict what comes next and transmit this as a form of present knowledge.

Based on this, I propose another term: synthetic synesthesia. I extend the human cognitive ability of mental time travel to the planetary scale, where interconnected technological infrastructures function as a form of time travel through continuous perception, memory, and prediction.