Perestroika: Reconstructed, will be produced as both a single screen film and a two screen installation: here the re-enactment itself becomes performative, both the text and the con-text of the work.

The two sequences in Perestroika: Reconstructed are connected through mirroring, echoes and correspondences; the meaning of the work is dependent on the relationship between them: Whilst one reading suggests that memory is a construct, the truth of a moment or an event contingent on whichever narrative is framing it, another reading suggests an explicit environmental allegory. This is the main conceptual axis of the work: both Sequence One and Sequence Two conclude at Lake Baikal, the first experience is of terror/apocalypse, the second, an experience of beauty and tranquillity.  Crucially, both experiences exist only in memory, they are the 'real' that we no longer have access to but they mirror the social disavowal of climate change. In northeast Europe we know climate change is happening but cannot feel it; or we feel climate change is happening but we cannot know it, as we’re not (yet) affected. This is ultimately where the audience is left: our 're-experience' of the lake is 'contaminated' by the affectual knowledge of our initial encounter. Reading across both sequences pulls into play what we both feel and know; an uncontaminated experience of landscape is now literally and metaphorically something that only exists in memory.