SHANA’S METHOD

Work on the film began during our participation in the “Biostation” art residency, held at the scientific laboratories of the I. P. Pavlov Institute of Physiology. There, we asked ourselves how not only scientific facts but also our very conceptions of reality are formed. Scientific laboratories, religious practice, artistic imagination, mystical experience, and everyday life are usually viewed as autonomous domains with their own criteria of truth. We, however, are interested in the space of their mutual translation and inevitable misunderstanding. Rather than pitting science against myth or faith against rationality, the film views them as different practices of world-making—ways of populating the world with people, animals, spirits, technologies, images, and ideas. Shana emerged even before the film was made, as an artistic self-experiment. Various facets of her materiality have manifested in our creative collective’s projects since 2020. Shana is our attempt to at least partially step back from our own egos and try to understand how the Other thinks. Existing simultaneously as a mythical creature, a digital avatar, and a physical presence, she moves between worlds. Her hybrid nature becomes a method of perception and a means of resisting fixed identities. All the characters are real people. Each encounter is structured as a performative situation in which participants encounter Shana for the first time and react to her spontaneously, based on their own experiences, worldviews, and ways of being in the world. Here, documentary film does not serve as a tool for representing a pre-existing reality. Instead, we witness the collaborative construction of reality, and—to our surprise—each of Shana’s interlocutors—whether a scientist, a pastor, an artist, or a hermit—reveals themselves to be a person with an artistic mindset. By blending documentary footage, performance, and mythological narrative, «Shana’s Method» seeks to create a cinematic experience in which these different worlds temporarily come into contact with one another. The “other” is not merely an animal, a non-human, or a mythological being. Every person turns out to be the “other.” A scientist to a pastor. A pastor to a Daoist. A Daoist to a researcher. An artist to a scientist. Shana’s Method is a practice of radical openness, in which no single point of view holds a monopoly on truth or can claim to provide a definitive description of reality, and every encounter becomes an act of mutual transformation.