The Other Side of the Pipeline

Chaired by Tania Gómez (SAVA UCL). 

Philipp Goll and Oleksiy Radynski will be in conversation around the film Where Russia Ends (2024) and discuss it in the context of ‘Leak. The End of the Pipeline’, a collaborative research project produced together with the artist Hito Steyerl at the Museum der Bildenden Künste Leipzig in April 2024. Taking up the development of the gas pipeline system between Siberia and (West) Germany since the 1970s, the exhibition consists of an installative video sculpture entitled Leak and the essay film Where Russia Ends, the contents of which intertwine and correlate. In their talk, they will reflect on the collaborative process during the making of Where Russia Ends, which departs from a question: ‘What’s happening on the other side of the pipeline?’

The film Where Russia Ends (2024) examines the often-overlooked history of colonialism and environmental destruction in the Russian-occupied territories of the indigenous peoples of Siberia. In 2022, previously unknown film footage was discovered in Kyiv Science Film Studios (Kyivnaukfilm). It documents numerous expeditions that a group of Ukrainian filmmakers undertook in the 1980s to various parts of Siberia and the Far North. This material forms the basis for the reconstruction of the erased history of the numerous imperialist wars that Russia waged against its later colonies. Where Russia Ends examines the manifold forms of complicity that played a role in this, shedding light on the ideology of exploitation and development of natural resources. The film is a collaboration between filmmaker Oleksiy Radynski and researcher Philipp Goll.

This event is organised within the framework of the Socialist Anthropocene in the Visual Arts (SAVA), an interdisciplinary, visual-arts led research project led by Principal Investigator Dr. Maja Fowkes at UCL Institute of Advanced Studies, which was selected for a Consolidator Grant by the European Research Council (ERC) and is funded by UK Research and Innovation (UKRI).

Speaker biographies

Oleksiy Radynski is a filmmaker and writer based in Kyiv. He is the SAVA Creative Fellow at PACT, UCL Institute of Advanced Studies. His films experiment with documentary forms and practices of political cinema. They have been screened at film festivals and in art contexts worldwide, including International Film Festival Rotterdam, Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, the Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), e-flux (New York), Docudays (Kyiv), Sheffield Doc Fest, Krakow IFF, DOK Leipzig etc. His film Chornobyl 22 won the Grand Prix at Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen in 2023. His texts have been published in e-flux journal, The Atlantic, and Die Tageszeitung, among others. Currently, his work is focused on investigating the toxic legacies of settler colonialism in North East Eurasia, with a focus on the rise of Russian fossil fascism and its multiple imperial wars, including the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Philipp Goll studied Media Studies, Slavic Studies and European Ethnology in Siegen, Wrocław and Berlin. He works as a researcher and freelance writer and lives in Berlin. In his research, he focuses on artistic research and knowledge production in literature and film and most recently published the reader "Harun Farocki's Didactics" (ed. with Anne Röhl, 2024, Spector Verlag Leipzig). Since the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine, he has increasingly devoted himself to the history of the German-Russian gas trade and it’s colonial context, organising events such as "Resisting Russian petro-aggression. Indigenous rights in Siberia, Extractivism, Ukraine war" (ZK/U Berlin, 2022), academic seminars and translations for "die tageszeitung" of Oleksiy Radynski's essays on the subject. In 2023 he co-organized the online lecture series “Research at Risk: Fossil Authoritarianism and Climate Catastrophe.”