From "Memory Decay" project Print

We both were born in Donetsk, city where is bloody war going is on now, east in Ukraine. From 2007 we started to live in Crimea in Sevastopol. We had a studio there, and we implemented different art projects in quite relaxed atmosphere, inspired by the sea. When the EuroMaidan was started, we with our pro-Ukrainian, pro-European position got the problems. Alexandra was beaten on the EuroMaidan in Sevastopol. Everyone knew our position, and we could be chased as a number of other activists who supported EuroMaidan. Pro-Russian moods became more and more strong, so we were in dangerous situation and we had to leave Sevastopol. We went in Donetsk hoping to sale the heritage: after the death of Alexander's parents he got the flat. Having intention to sale it we started the juristic process. During our staying in Donetsk we discovered that all our film archives have been destroyed and only several images remained. We've remembered the memorial places, key symbols of the city – like a slag heap, factory pipes, street scenes and other cherished symbols, that we took on film during our past years of living in Donetsk in childhood and youth. And we decided to try to restore our archives. Therefore we started to take photos of those important places for us, meaningful objects, buildings, streets, trying to restore all what we were shooting before. So we got the archive, the new one, with “refreshed”, “restored” memories. We tried to restore all what as we thought has been photographed. While working on memories restoration, we realized that memory is playing the game with our mind. We’ve faced the fact that entropy plays an important role in the way the memory mechanisms work. Sometimes you can not define, you only was going to take the photo or you've done it; you can not remember clearly was there a person on the landscape background or not, from which point you shot it. This is kind of artificial archive, falsification of memories. There is no portraits in this photo series. Our memory wants to remove images of people, clear itself from memories about close ones: this is too painful. The people who lived in that old Donetsk - some of them tragically died, some of them changed, some with fear started to pretend that they like what's going on. Our plans to selling the flat were violated: in April of 2014 pro-Russian troops occupied Donetsk. In May we went for three days to Kiev because we were invited to the Congress of Cultural Activists. After the Congress we were planning to come back in Donetsk. But we still not back. How British philosopher and artist Luke Turner noted in his Metamodernist Manifesto, “All things are caught within the irrevocable slide towards a state of maximum entropic dissemblance”. In psychology there is a Memory Decay theory which supposes that memory fades due to the mere passage of time. Each new experience leaves a “memory trace” which eventually disintegrates. Now looking back our mind perceives it like a misty dream. We tried to restore our memory by photographing the meaningful objects and places. But the memories of life in Donetsk before the war, in city which doesn’t exist anymore, becomes similar to mosaic tiles falling off a Soviet wall; its structure decomposes and memories, one by one, go down and dissolve into darkness. The series was shown within the exhibition "Life of Deportation and Settlement" at the Korea Foundation gallery in Seoul (April of 2017). Courtesy of the Korea Foundation.

Print:Giclee on Photo Paper

Size:12 W x 8 H x 0.1 D in

Size with Frame:17.25 W x 13.25 H x 1.2 D in

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