Irusan or, Canting For Architects

In 1931, architect Ivan Il’ič Leonidov was sent 2,800 kilometres northeast of Moscow to assist in constructing the new Soviet arctic port of Igarka. The city, though presented as an inscription of the future into the vast void of Siberia, in fact 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. This transdisciplinary work employs the Ket language as a medium of academic architectural discussion.