Kharkiv Municipal Gallery presents “Weather Diaries / Weather Maps,” a solo project by young artist Olia Fedorova, laureate of the NonStopMedia VIII festival.

“At school, this was an assignment for natural science class. We had special notebooks where we recorded our observations of the weather every day. In separate columns, we entered the temperature, humidity, atmospheric pressure, cloud cover, precipitation, and wind direction.

For the first month, I kept the diary very diligently, but later I increasingly forgot or was simply too lazy to make entries. The gaps could be short, lasting a single day, or they could last several days in a row, or even an entire week. At the end of the semester, in order not to get a failing grade for the assignment, the gaps in the notebook were filled with random values.

Two years ago, I tried to repeat this school experience. I started a notebook again and began methodically, cell by cell, like a diligent student, filling it with the symbols I remembered from school. But for me, this process was no longer about the weather itself. Now I was more interested in visualizing routine itself – as a phenomenon, as a monotonous, regularly repeated and, to some extent, meditative action.

But it is difficult to maintain a routine for long, even when you are an adult. Empty cells appeared in my notebook again – at first there were very few of them, and they were lost among the pages covered with bright blue and red symbols. Then there were more and more of them, forming rows and entire patches of emptiness.

And soon I saw that it was precisely this alternation of gaps and filled cells that created a unique pattern in my diary, making each subsequent page different from the previous one. In the same way, the placement of pauses turns noise into melody, while punctuation marks assemble a text from a collection of disconnected words.

I began observing this interplay – between filled and empty, existing and absent, action and non-action.
I documented my observations in diaries, which reveal the interplay page by page, from beginning to end, and in maps, where the whole can be seen – the beginning, middle, and end of the game in a single moment. Over the course of two years, five diaries and five weather maps were created.”