Open Group: Repeat After Me - NEXT LEVEL

The protagonists are civilian refugees who talk about the war through the sounds of the weapons they remember and ask the audience to do the same. While the first part was filmed in Lviv (Lviv) in the summer of 2022, the locations for the second part (2024) are Poland, Austria, Germany, Lithuania, Ireland and the USA. But even beyond the siren marathon, the sounds of war remain part of their trauma and symbolically extend their reach. But here they are not songs, but shots, rockets, howls and explosions, and the lyrics are descriptions of deadly weapons. It is the soundtrack of war.

A few weeks before the Russian invasion, the Center for Strategic Communication and Information Security of the Ministry of Culture and Information Policy began distributing brochures entitled “In case of danger or war”. The instructions differ depending on whether it is an attack with automatic weapons, artillery fire, multiple rocket launchers or an air attack. The ability to recognize these sounds saves their lives, and we learn the language of their experiences. Repeat after Me shows the war as a collective experience, regardless of age, origin, professional and social status, allows contemporary witnesses to have their say and draws attention to individual experiences of this catastrophe. At the end of his book Sonic Warfare (2009), Steve Goodman paraphrases a famous quote from Deleuze, replacing “to look” with “to listen”: “There is no reason to fear or hope, but only to ... [listen] ... for new weapons. When it comes to recognizing the future of war by its sounds, in the two years since the war began, the entire Ukrainian population has been listening closely to the new weapons being used against them to terrorize and destroy them.One of the new sounds the collective had to add to the new part of the project was the infamous Iranian Shahed-136 kamikaze drones.Since the early fall of 2022, these drones have been used by Russia in massive attacks to destroy civilian, energy and critical infrastructure (by the end of February 2024, a total of 4,588 Shahed-136s had been used against Ukraine).Many Ukrainians will forever remember the unmistakable, loud hum of the Shaheds' engines in the night sky and the unsettling sudden silence just before landing on their target.

The testimonies of the protagonists shed light on the countries in which they have contacts with refugees. This is particularly relevant today as we are simultaneously witnessing genocide in Gaza, a growing conflict between China and Taiwan and other ongoing armed conflicts, not to mention the recent huge influx of refugees into Europe from countries such as Libya, Syria, Yemen and many others.Each of these conflicts is becoming a powder keg for the planet, another crisis, a disease of the world, erupting in many places at once.Because the whole world is an area of displacement and flight, and there is no single, safe place for protection. Repeat after me: 2024 speaks of all the world's refugees.

Team: director: OPEN GROUP — Yuriy Biley, Pavlo Kovach, Anton Varga/ cast: Natalia, Hanna, Anya, Samir, Tymofii, Yana, Vlad, Anastasia, Ira, Inna, Valerii, Maria, Halyna, Maryna, Tetiana, Taisia/ producer: Viktoriia Dorr/
director of photography: Dmytro Churikov, Tomi Hazhlinsky, Justin Warsh/ editors: Yuriy Biley, Pavlo Kovach, Anton Varga, Dmytro Churikov/ sound design: Dmytro Churikov/ colour correction: Artem Stretovych/ sound: Piotr Blajerski/ translation: Iryna Kurhanska/ The producer of Repeat after Me (2024) is Zachęta – National Gallery of Art.

This film was created specially for the Repeat after Me ll exhibition presented at the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, in the Polish Pavilion in Venice (20.04–24.11.2024). Curator: Marta Czyż
Polish participation in the 60th International Art Exhibition in Venice is financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage of Poland.
© Open Group: Yuriy Biley, Pavlo Kovach, Anton Varga, 2024
The video work Repeat after Me 2024 was created with the involvement of refugees staying in Wrocław (Poland), Vienna (Austria), Berlin (Germany), Vilnius (Lithuania), New York (USA) and Tullamore (Ireland).