2022 — ongoing

My project is about how Russia's contemporary regime has become a space of non-alienation, in which democratic and authoritarian values coexist, compiled by unprocessed intergenerational trauma and the impossibility of a full-fledged cleavage in the past historical temporality. A state in which values are prosthetic mechanisms of pain, war and death. I am also interested in how the identity of the country is formed today, one of the unifying practices in the search for a fulcrum of which is grief as a ritual of the «imagined nation, ” embedded in the concept of commemorative practices of memory. I am concerned that the supreme mission of the state is to die for it, the constant reenactment of the past in the present; that the foundation of the state is the fear of oblivion and its acceptance at the same time.

I conduct the experiment based on the notion of the modern regime as a theatricalized temporality in the context of the mythologization of history. The entire photographic project is a reconstruction of a theatrical performance, which combines the past, present and future of the country. But the frames are limited in the present, because any performance has a beginning and an end. 

I was interested in the question of whether the current regime alone has really influenced the current events, what happened to Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and what will happen in the present. I often observe that the formation of a nation and its collective identity, its participants of different generations, directly influence what an what an authoritarian regime does. I wanted to understand why there has not been a process of living the traumas of the past, living the trauma of «country-not-winner», and what role different generations play in this.

Filming is carried out on the territories of former Soviet buildings and military fortifications (DOTs, forts).