Wake up to... a lot of sand!
Recently SUPERSWEET’s Poonperm Paitayawat has spotted something rather intriguingly original on television: a Twinning Tea advert. It features a pair of hands splashing supposedly dehydrated tea leaves on a blank canvass shaping them into a set of dozy eyes and quickly to be brushed aside to create a panorama of the sun peeping up between two tea-leaf hills. Another SUPERSWEET mission is set: Poonperm is to identify the hands that fiddle with the tealeaves.
After a series of Google-ing of the words “hands” and “tea”, we stumbled onto something even more tantalising: a young lady, a massive light box, some spellbinding music and a lot of sand. This one and only lady is called Kseniya Simonova, a sand animator who is doing something a little too similar to the Twinning commercials--brushing sand over the light box creating some animated and very touching stories. Over a deliberation at the SS panel and after a further tealeaf enquiry, SS rules out Simonova’s are the Twinning hands - and also that there is no tealeaf in the Twinning commercial.
Simonova started sand animation after her businesses had gone bust during the 2008 financial crisis. One year later she picked herself up by using her sensational 9 minute-long sand stories to wow, woo and win the public votes on Ukraine’s Got Talent. Yes, the question is what does she draw to snatch the heart and induce the tears of the Ukrainian viewers.
Answer? A history told from a perspective of a non-witness. Simonova’s finale performance “War Requiem” on Ukraine’s Got Talent depicts what the Russian (and Ukrainian) know as the Great Patriotic War against the Third Reich, also known as the Nazis, during World War II. There is no scene of gun fire or battlefield on Simonova’s light box, no active participants, no Hitler, no propagandist message, only an emotional portrayal of life during the war, of one country being invaded by another and of those bereft of their loved ones.
Simonova often focuses her narrative on a suffering of female protagonists and dramatically showcases the compassionate family unit broken down and torn away. “War Requiem” portrays a girl whose peaceful life is thrown into chaos by the Nazi invasion. A man she loves leaves her to join the army and protect their Motherland. A few seconds later he dies and his tomb is erected. She is often seen cradling the newborn baby and looking out the window in hopes that her lover’s death might have been mistaken and one day he would return.
Simonova’s sand animation performance is marked by the lighting of the candles at the beginning, a requiem to her country’s devastated history and its sufferers. A slow and harmonious tune “Jeux d’Eau” from Cirque du Soleil is toppled with creaking radio announcement and rampant inspirational songs written during the War, such as “The Sacred War”, suggesting the escalating tension, the urgency of wars and Russian patriotism. The story ends with “Nothing Else Matters” by Apocalyptica and Simonova writes what can be translated as “You are forever beside us” marking not just the everlasting love of the animated woman but the sense of history and emotional trauma Russian and Ukrainian people still share since 1945 till the present days.
Words: Poonperm Paitayawat
Sand Animation: Kseniya Simonova