Arrival · Andrey Shepel

The work

Arrival is a video assembled from fragments of black-and-white Soviet war films in which people wait for a train that never arrives.

Removed from their original narratives and placed together, the scenes no longer lead toward reunion, departure or resolution. Waiting itself becomes the protagonist. Platforms, faces and gestures accumulate around an event that is repeatedly anticipated and permanently postponed.

The soundtrack is taken from the film Arrival (2016), connecting the archival images to another story structured around contact with the unknown and a transformed experience of time.

In this montage, arrival exists only as a possibility produced by expectation. The work suspends its characters between a past recorded by cinema and a future that remains outside the frame.

The festival

Emigration to the Future was an interdisciplinary festival that took place in Berlin-Wedding, 7–9 August 2026, bringing together artists, performers and researchers from seven countries working across performance, installation, video, sound and public intervention. Curated by Vsevolod Lisovsky and Anton Polski (MAKE / Citizen Make), across venues including exBrache, Chto Delat and public space around Wedding.

emigrationtothefuture.org · Telegram: @emigrationtothefuture

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