Errare humanum est

The most interesting ideas – she used to say – are the fruit of error and coincidence. Gabi Scardi remembers the writer, essayist, curator and artist Svetlana Boym, who died in August.

Svetlana Boym erred, deviated and strayed, preferring lateral shifts and transversal routes to linear advancement. She identified with life’s sinuosity and contradictory thought, the chance to find something thought provoking and new parallels. The possibility of failure was factored in, accidents along the way did not disarm her and the unpredictable side effects of her zigzagging brought an opportunity to broaden her field of vision and fuel a thought that was always on the move.

Boym was born in St Petersburg and grew up watching films in the cinema run by her parents. In 1980, she left a collapsing Soviet Union for the United States, a journey that involved stopovers including a period of isolation in a Vienna transit centre and time spent improvising in Rome as she awaited her re-departure. Her first focus in the USA was learning languages, Spanish in particular. She then became Curt Hugo Reisinger Professor of Slavic Language and Literatures and Comparative Literature at Harvard.

She wrote essays that were both critical and literary, such as Death in Quotation Marks: Cultural Myths of the Modern Poet (1991), Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (1994), The Future of Nostalgia (2001), Another Freedom: The Alternative History of an Idea (2010); and in 2012 she published a novel entitled Ninochka.

When not working at the university, she travelled at a giddy pace, frequently invited to lecture but also as a curator. Among other things, she was involved in the Albanian Pavilion at the 12th Venice Architecture Biennale, which exhibited a project by Edi Rama, artist and then-Mayor of Tirana, today the Albanian Prime Minister, who wanted to transform the city of Tirana based on the colours of the building facades.

Were all this not enough, Boym had an alter ego called Olga Carr, from whose account she sometimes wrote emails to friends and acquaintances.

Towards the end of her life, she had also discovered an artistic talent and, once again, chance was central to her work. Against all rhetoric and pretention, Svetlana argued that her works – like the most interesting ideas – were fruit of error and coincidence. They were collages or photographs in which she formed distorted cityscapes or saw portraits and figures reflected in puddles or a flowing river. A photograph pulled impatiently out of a printer might reveal a dynamism or sense of time that was lacking in the original shot; and, to her eyes, blurred outlines in a puddle became precious epiphanies. The performative aspect implicit in these processes became a significant part of the work, combined with the theoretical process and a tendency for unique technical experimentation. Work developed into texts on the production process behind the work and various other themes.

Interests explored by Boym converged in a theory that was, in turn, fluid and proteiform; manifestations of the missed or unexplored but still vital potential of today’s modernity are lurking everywhere and contain the potential for starting to build a liveable world again. Success and failure, hybrid utopias, porous time and a story “out of synch”, an interest in ruins, anamorphosis, shadows and pentimento are all pieces in the jigsaw of an off-modern spirit (Svetlana Boym published Architecture of the Off-Modern for Princeton Architectural Press in 2008).

Her conversation was rich, passionate and ironical, based on shifts and links, memories and future projects. Her texts, as too her personality, spoke of emerging from personal confines and disciplinary constraints to opt for the unconsolidated and venture into unexplored terrains.

In the face of our tendency for fragmentation, contingency, sampling, polarisation, self-immunisation, to keep things “outside” and build barriers, mental and non-, her stubborn roaming through different spheres spoke of a passionate resistance to the predictable and ideological in everyday life. Boym saw the peculiar, the error and human exploration, all full of potential, as expressions of a perpetual exile of the mind: an exile that generates not regression but freedom, relations and wealth of thought.

Svetlana Boym, who took risks and got lost without being disheartened, was taken ill at the height of her intellectual energy and creative fervour. She was, among other things, working on the publication of her Off Modern, which was to take the form of an exhibition; and on the project of rebuilding the history of that sort of clearing house in Vienna where, like her, many Russian Jews spent their period of transit towards a new life. Some of her many friends scattered worldwide were left with the arduous task of channelling her last projects.

Until the end of June 2016, Svetlana Boym’s works will be exhibited at Harvard University’s Department of Comparative Literature.

Errare humanum est

The most interesting ideas – she used to say – are the fruit of error and coincidence. Gabi Scardi remembers the writer, essayist, curator and artist Svetlana Boym, who died in August.

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