Encounters with Baikal
collection of auto-theory fiction stories, digital platform, 2019-2021
encounterswithbaikal.info
Composed of fifteen short stories, this project is a personal travel diary written during a Lake Baikal (Russia) trip. With each story resembling a weekly entry, it carefully reflects the lakeside environments: its peoples, natural worlds, and politics that mediate their relations. Every story begins by describing personal travels along the lake and observes how lived experience connects with different histories of the region.
The diary’s structure is organized by the reading list to the Ocean as Archive module (Goldsmiths, 2019-2020) in response to which the project was conceived. While works from this list provide conceptual tools, the diary also includes personal records and historical accounts of Lake Baikal to analyze life around this vast freshwater reservoir.
presentation: residues of wetness : introduction, self-organised online event, 2020