REMNANTS Collage

This project is based on archive family photographs taken between 1940 and 1980. The collection included suggests an exploration of the national identity issue which, in the given case, is not just marked by the polemic in the family frame but that of the entire nation which it is a part of as well. I was born in the Republic of Moldova but at the age of 10 I immigrated with my family to Greece. Without any knowledge of the past of my origin, for many years, everything seemed to be covered in ashes. It was at a very early stage that I lost touch with my roots. I recently decided to take a journey to the past. I came across a rather large amount of letters written in the ’50 -’70 era, family photographs and my grandmother’s personal documents revealing her active political life as a member of the Communist Party of the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic. I slowly began to understand why there was little to no reference to that period. The first contact with this “anthropological museum” was accompanied by hostility and emotional detachment fueled by the fact that the letter was written in Cyrillic. As emotional this first contact with them proved to be, that much intense was the rupture between myself and the national, as well as my own, historical past. I know well however that this is a part of me, indifferent to the ideological hazard that takes place between us two. As oxymoron this phenomenon might be, it dwells not only in every household but in the entire ideological, historical and cultural context of this nation. The discourse of this project is situated on a problematic level woven to personal as well as collective memories of a people in transition, in which the only way of historical debauchery involves embracing the past. This process involves not just an awareness of the memory of the past, but also a reconciliation with it. This collection of photographs and documents has generated a subconscious impulse to combine the fragility as well as the ephemeral element of the flowers, which can also be seen as a form of natural “stain”, with the characters in the pictures while at the same time introducing the physical element. By doing so, I also seek to create a parallelism between the photographic process and that of a herbarium, by which we try to preserve ‘’ life ‘’ on a flat, two-dimensional surface, while at the same time underlining the fact that we are all ghosts, trapped in a repetitive cycle of a journey between the past and the future, that are altered by external forces such as territory and socio-political context.