Floating Ghost
A curatorial project addressing geopolitical situations between Russia and the Western world.
Project
Floating Ghost was presented within the context of Manifesta 10 programming, at the On Board & What Is Monumental Today? Symposium. The project concerns geopolitical situations between Russia and the Western world.
- Manifesta 10 On Board
- What Is Monumental Today? Symposium on the Politics of Memory in St. Petersburg
Floating Ghost is a curatorial project by visual artist and curator Jussi Koitela, presented in the context of Manifesta 10 programming at the On Board & What Is Monumental Today? symposium. The work engages with geopolitical situations between Russia and the Western world, treating memory as a contested public surface rather than a settled historical record. Rather than illustrating events, the project asks how monuments and their absences shape the way publics read recent history, and how such readings harden into habit.
The symposium framing places the project within a discussion of the politics of memory, where symbolic architecture serves as an instrument of state narrative and civic forgetting. Koitela's approach responds to this field through research, textual material, and curatorial framing, allowing the condition of the monument to be examined alongside the ordinary surroundings that survive it. Images, fragments, and commentary accumulate into a quiet, essayistic sequence that resists spectacle in favour of sustained attention.
Conceptually, the project works with the idea of the ghost as a presence that is felt but not fully seen, an unresolved remainder carried forward across political borders and generational shifts. That metaphor extends naturally into the wider vocabulary surrounding the work: dissolving frontiers, floating arrangements, and models of post-war economy, capital, and extraction that continue to structure life long after their official narratives have closed. The curatorial writing treats these as layered conditions rather than discrete topics.
For visitors, the project offers a reflective way of considering how institutional memory is built, funded, and maintained, and how small or portable museum-like forms of display can intervene in that process. The accompanying texts and studies, written in a literary register, move between observation and ethical reflection on the artist's role within institutional demands. The result is an open-ended body of work that invites reading, discussion, and continued questioning of what monumentality means today.