Sound Art · 2026-06-30
A Russian village audio walk, off the grid
In the village of Porogi in Chelyabinsk Region, director Anton Lapko has recently created an immersive, headphone-based audio walk from the stories of local people. There is no phone signal or internet at the site, which is also home to Russia's oldest hydroelectric plant.
The piece, “Porogi. Voices over the Water,” was written and directed by Anton Lapko, founder of the Russian Theatre of Games and Journeys. The production was created through an artistic residency at the ZA ART Center for Contemporary Art in Yekaterinburg, with local municipal support. The voices are performed by local residents, including the Zimogori ensemble, who sing miners' songs, and more than twenty people from Satka and its surroundings.
The walk lasts about thirty minutes. It follows Porozhskaya Street and the bank of the Bolshaya Satka river. It tells not the history of industry but human lives: a taxi-driver veteran, a mining engineer who founded a factory, and a former caretaker of the power plant. The Porogi plant is Russia's oldest hydroelectric station; it ran on 1909 equipment right up to 2017.
There is no phone signal or internet at the site. The audio file and the map must therefore be downloaded in advance from the project's website, historyporogi.ru.
🎧 historyporogi.ru (hangfájl + térkép)
Cast & Crew
- Director, writer Anton Lapko
- Voice Anatoly Manzin
- Voice Nikita Savrulin
- Voice Vitaly Shevaldi
- Music Zimogori ensemble
Sources: hornews.com · historyporogi.ru
This article was machine-composed under human supervision.