aliveduo

aliveduo, formed by Alena Starostina and Ivan Nikolaev, is an artistic partnership working in the field of time-based media. They were born in Saint Petersburg/Russia and graduated from the Russian State Institute of Performing Arts in 2007. In 2010, they co-founded theatre post, which became one of the leading voices on the local experimental scene. They worked on plays by contemporary playwrights and created their own original productions. Their artistic development was influenced by working with texts by John Cage, Alvin Lucier, and Belarusian playwright Pavel Pryazhko.

After relocating to Germany in 2022, they began working as aliveduo, exploring an interdisciplinary approach in which stage presence and film projections, everyday movements and live sounds interact within a shared space, creating a kind of performative cinema. Their recent project Letters Home (premiered in January 2025 at Festspielhaus Hellerau) is conceived as a reflection on the experience of war-related emigration. It draws on diary-like collections of thoughts, noises, and videos accumulated over three years. Using analog media and their own bodies as living archives, the piece unfolds as a fragmented chronicle of sensations, capturing memories and the search for belonging.

The idea of temporary, vanishing imprints is one of the key points in their work. Trace of a Silent Tear, a short movie that began to take shape at the Saari Residence in Finland in 2023, explores Karelian lamentation traditions and reflects on forced displacement, invisibility, and silence not only at the narrative level but also through the conceptual construction of the material. The film was selected for Laterale Film Festival (Italy), RPM Fest (USA), and BISFF (China).