Year: 2024
Media: Touch Designer
"Winter in Russia" emerged as a collaboration with musician Iris Lune exploring the complex terrain of home, displacement, and identity. As part of Lune's ambitious visual album project "Home is Where," this work represents a deeply personal excavation of immigrant experience, transforming intimate conversations and collected memories into an audiovisual meditation.
The project began with a deceptively simple question: "What is home?" For me, living as a political asylee, this inquiry opened unexplored emotional territories, revealing suppressed feelings and reconnecting with aspects of identity dormant for over fifteen years. Through extensive conversations with Iris Lune, I took an archaeological dig through memory and sensation, constructing a sonic archive that captured the essence of a homeland.
This sound library became an exercise in emotional cartography—rooster calls echoing across childhood mornings, the howling of blizzards that defined seasonal rhythms, church bells marking communal time, the mechanical cycle of a washing machine threading through domestic life. Each audio fragment served as both artifact and portal, carrying the weight of lived experience while offering raw material for artistic transformation.
Later Iris Lune weaving the sounds and our conversations into a a song “Winter in Russia.”
The video component emerged as a visual response to hearing the completed song, utilizing slime mold and TouchDesigner to create imagery that mirrors the organic, unpredictable nature of memory and adaptation. The choice of medium—working with a non-human collaborator in slime mold—reflects broader investigations into agency, growth, and the formation of new networks. The biological processes of the slime mold guided computer alrorythm to manipulate and re-construct memories.
Still from the video
Still from the video
The collaboration extended beyond typical artist-to-artist exchange, becoming a form of mutual witnessing and shared vulnerability. As a practicing musician I was also able to contribute backing vocals to the song adding another layer of presence to the work. Embedding my voice within the sonic landscape of the song and weaving with Iris Lune’s voice allowed us to explore and embody different fragments and echos.
"Winter in Russia" functions simultaneously as personal catharsis and political statement, examining how immigrant identity becomes reshaped by ongoing geopolitical conflicts. The work, although released years later, became a critical groundwork for subsequent explorations, including the piece "Phantom Limb," which further investigates the psychological and social dimensions of displaced identity. Through its integration of intimate narrative, experimental sound design, biological processes, and digital manipulation, the project exemplifies contemporary interdisciplinary practice while addressing timeless questions of belonging, loss, and transformation.
The work exists within the larger context of "Home is Where," a visual album featuring collaborations across ten songs with artists from different global locations, all exploring varied facets of home and displacement. Proceeds from the album support organizations assisting displaced persons and unhoused communities.
You can listen to the song on all major platforms.
