Irúsan

In 1931, architect Ivan Il’ic Leonidov was sent 2,800 kilometers northeast of Moscow to assist in constructing the new Soviet arctic port of Igarka. The city stood in the traditional territory of speakers of the indigenous language of Ket. Today spoken fluently by fewer than twenty people, the language isolate offers a grammatical model of reality unrelated to Indo-European language structures. By employing the Ket language as a medium of academic architectural discussion, this text creates an encounter between Leonidov’s fantastical architectural drawings and native Ket speaker and linguist Dr. Zoâ Vasil’evna Maksunova to pose hybridization, fiction-making and translation as means of performing research. The work’s graphical elements and lyrical prose challenge conventional ways in which the history and knowledge of architecture are constructed.