Lengthwise thread

I rethink images of the Soviet past, family archives, giving them my own meanings, drawing attention to what was previously unspoken and unreflected. In this way, I try to regain my lost subjectivity and show how you can revamp your past in order to take it into the future. Lengthwise thread is the most personal of all my projects, and it is impossible without that part of my family history that concerns repressions. The deportation of my ancestors from Moldova to Siberia became a turning point in their lives and largely determined my own. In our family, as in many Soviet and post-Soviet families, the topic of deportation was hushed up. But this event runs through many destinies, especially women’s, like a lengthwise thread. In 1941, my grandmother’s family was destroyed, like a million families during Stalin’s repressions. Her mother and three children were exiled to Siberia, and her father was sent to the camp on false charges, where he died two years later. Big waves scattered millions of small personal stories, shattered human connections into pieces and left a mark on subsequent generations. That is why the idea of ​​stitching and combining old scraps is still so close to me. This is a way of harmonizing and coordinating what is destroyed and seems impossible to combine into the whole. And that is why the oval shape was chosen as the embodiment of some ideal unattainable state of peace.

  In this project, I use clothing and fabrics that I inherited from my mother and grandmother. I print my photographs on them, as well as pictures from my personal archive, case materials that I managed to find in the archives of Moldova and Russia, and create collages from fabrics, adding memorable items. I print photographs using gum-arabic transfer on an etching machine, and digitally. I plan to make several dozen works: ovals and fabric panels without a frame using my archives and the author’s photographs. This is the exhibition part of the project. In addition, I plan to make a book that will partially include my already taken documentary photographs from Moldova and Siberia, archives, drawings, texts, as well as staged photographs that I have yet to take. Now I have done all the preparatory work, found all the archival files of my ancestors in Moldova and Russia, went to the Bksana Moldovan village where my grandmother’s relatives lived, went to city of Soroka, where my grandmother was born and lived for 10 years before the deportation. Now I am planning a trip to the Siberian village of Mogochino, where my ancestors were deported, a trip to the IvdelLAG camp, where my grandmother’s father, Yakov Prazhina, died, and a trip to Tomsk to talk with historians and archivists. I need this to better understand how the deportation of Moldovans took place, where to look for information about the survivors, and how their fates turned out.