Stefaniia Bodnia & Jack Dove
Stefaniia Bodnia (born in Mariupol, Ukraine) is a multidisciplinary artist who works with visual communication, installation and printed matter. Her research-based work engages with the materiality of typography and graphics, used as a tool to construct narratives that address history, society and personal experiences. She explores themes of the geopolitical dynamics between the West and East, as well as the intersection of materiality with technology, geology and power structures.
Is a musician and artist from London exploring contemporary composition methods through electronic experimentation and performance. Dove produces unpredictable listening experiences. He uses combinations of pyro,strobes, and other types of artificial] light to interact with and control his homemade electronic circuits and mechanical machines, finding ways to generate unique sound textures from responding resonating objects.
ECHOES ON POROUS GROUND
2025
Steel plates, audio-installation
Like the layers of sediment peeled back during precious metal and mineral mining, war operations leave behind a perforated landscape, resulting in a porous structure with voids and encapsulated spaces within the layers of the land. Bodnia and Dove draw parallels between personal trauma and geotrauma, where the layers of geological formations intersect with vectors of power, embodying the violence of extractive practices and war.
The imagery combines satellite views of the mining area in eastern Ukraine, where military operations take place above and below ground; engravings of mineral porosity, and performative drawings of landscape. These layers reveal the vertical continuum connecting the subterranean and the digital realms, linking mines to the cloud.
The project gives a voice to materials, including minerals, land, non-human entities and human labour. All of these are seen as resources for the operations of power. Synthesized sounds and processed samples are constructed to move and distort the metal, placing reconstructions of unspoken memory into the steel while metal plates and sculptural elements are transformed into resonant instruments, allowing matter to speak.