Nothing Ever Happens
Valeria Prorizna is a Ukrainian filmmaker and visual artist working between the black box and the white cube. She examines spatial justice and suppressed histories through video installations, spatial research, and film programming.
Valeria studied documentary filmmaking at the Institute of Screen Arts in Kyiv, was part of the Open Library of Fine Arts, Plivka Art Centre, and KINOKO Film Festival, and collaborated as a producer with multiple video artists and filmmakers in Ukraine and across Europe. As a member of the Centre for Spatial Technologies (CST), Valeria has worked on 'City Within a Building', 'Nebelivka Hypothesis', and situated testimonies for the 'Mariupol Drama Theatre Spatial Archive'. Their most recent work, 'Church, Chora, Chersonese', is a two-screen video installation tracing archaeological narratives about the Ancient Greek city of Chersonese that have served shifting political agendas from the late eighteenth century until the current Russian occupation of the peninsula.
Valeria's video works with CST were presented at the Ukrainian Pavilion during Venice Biennale Architettura 2023, received a Prix Ars Electronica Honorary Mention, were shortlisted for the IJ4EU Impact Award 2024, and were exhibited at Akademie der Künste Berlin, M HKA Antwerp, ETH Zurich, and others.
She is currently developing 'Nothing Ever Happens', a speculative film exploring what Ukrainian culture might have looked like in the 1960s under alternative socio-political conditions.
The 1960s, often depicted as a decade of post-war prosperity, colonial emancipation, and sexual liberation, never arrived in Soviet Ukraine. Instead, Ukraine experienced cultural reaction, increasing repression, and a stifling atmosphere marked by forced parochialisation.
Conceived during The New Centre’s “Film and Forensic” workshop and first presented at Videopower’s Unfinished Film Festival, “Nothing Ever Happens” seeks to reclaim “the right to the sixties” retrospectively, exploring what Ukrainian spatial and material culture might have looked like under alternative socio-political conditions.
The project imagines spatial environments that could have housed suppressed or non-existent cultural movements, had they developed freely. Rather than envisioning a utopia, it sketches a scenario with its own contradictions, thus allowing us to distinguish between challenges rooted in imperial violence, new ones emerging under greater freedom, and those that would have persisted regardless.
“Nothing Ever Happens” is a speculative documentary drawing on Peter Watkins’ critique of the “monoform” — mass media’s repressive audiovisual language — and seeks to reinterpret archival material and construct counterfactuals. It takes the form of a research-based video installation, combining archival footage, period-correct synthesiser soundscapes by John Object, and reimaginings of architectural and industrial design.
The research follows three historical threads. The underwhelming nature of Sartre and de Beauvoir’s 1964 visit to Kyiv forms one; the advancement of audiovisual technologies and Kyiv as a centre of cybernetics forms another; cultural venues embodying the mythos of freedom in Western Europe, but distorted or absent in the Eastern Bloc, form the third.
While conventional historical analysis risks centring imperial power — the only reliably documented reality — the project instead develops the missing potentials of the era, buried under the Iron Curtain.
