DEAD WATER

DEAD WATER is a poetry film created in collaboration with AI tools that recurs to the magical practice of "dead water" rooted in Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian superstitions: Dead water is the term for the water used to wash a corpse. However, in Slavic culture it is imbued with superstitious meaning: It can be used by witches to curse people and cause all kind of harm, which means, that you can’t ever trust the women who would wash the body of your relatives after their death.
As it is so often the case, it is a superstition that points to a fear of women's magical potential.
The myth is prevalent throughout the Slavic region, but for family reasons, the artist is most familiar with the Russian context, so the work is located there.
The work exists both as video in a 16:9 format as well as immersive 360º video. It was created as a collage, combining real film elements with AI-generated video sequences and inserted into a 3D animated environment. The poem itself was recited by AI-generated voices, and the faces are AI-optimized portraits of the artist that were animated. The soundscape, on the other hand, is composed by the artist herself.