«Kromkhel’s Journey to the Seventh Heaven» is an interdisciplinary project that includes a book, an opera, and an animated film. After seeing the book with its meter-long pages at an exhibition at the Sigmund Freud Museum of Dreams in St. Petersburg, composer Nick Sudnik asked Lera Nibiru to write the libretto for the opera and created his «Opera of the null hour» from the «24 Rush Hours» opera cycle. Lera then created an animated film based on this opera.

«Kromkhel’s Journey to the Seventh Heaven» is Valeria Nibiru’s fairy tale
where the structure of the universe is described. Taking the name of the nonexistent mythical planet Nibiru, the artist tells old / new cosmogonic myths. The imaginary journey of Kromkhel continues the genre that has been popularsince the ancient times when the protagonist (or his soul) goes to heaven and learns its structure. The seventh heaven, that became the metaphor of the highest unearthly bliss, is an echo of the geocentric cosmogony. Crystal spheres with planets spin as in a mechanical toy around the Earth. The structure of the world in apocryphal cosmogony by Enoch that got to the seventh heaven is described. Kromkhel is born only a few moments after the universe has emerged. He is “a by-product of light and darkness separation” who began his journey from the deepest crevice. Kromkhel asks himself what is space, realizes that he is a wandering comet, travels from one heaven to another, feels materiality and gets out of the macrocosm, the world of stars, into the microcosm, the world of a cell. Starting his journey in the darkness of the crevice, Kromkhel at the end of the way finds himself in the seventh heaven – in the world of pure light. Kromkhel, changing depending on which heaven he comes to, is a cromlech, an ancient observatory. Just as the name of the fairy-tale character Rapunzel is taken from the name of the bell with the edible root Campanula rapunculus, Kromkhel is a memory about a cromlech – stones arranged in a concentric circle and placed vertically, though slightly modified because our character choked when his name was being pronounced. «Kromkhel’s Journey to the Seventh Heaven» is a book about Gulliver in the country of giants, which you can enter. The inconsistency of huge pages turns out to be proportional to the character who has to change all the time. In the end, it's not Kromkhel who makes up the story of his journey, but the stories about black matter, time and space, the chronotopos ... re-invent him. In the changeability of the main character created by Nibiru (considering childish poetic echolalia of his name), the relativistic principle as well as the postconceptual tradition of creating a character from the worlds around him, are reflected.

Olesya Turkina