My photographic work Doma (Home) – The Foundation of Memory explores memory as both a personal and collective practice. The now-abandoned house of my parents, once my childhood home and, for decades, a familial and cultural point of reference, has become a place of farewell.
As a Russian German who emigrated from Kyrgyzstan to Germany with her family in 1990, I navigate between two cultural identities. This in-between position shapes my perspective, including my photographic one.
As a Russian German who emigrated from Kyrgyzstan to Germany with her family in 1990, I navigate between two cultural identities. This in-between position shapes my perspective, including my photographic one.
For me, memory is not a clearly defined state, but a shifting process: subjective, fragmented, emotional, and at times even deceptive. My work poses the question: What remains when familiar places disappear and people are gone? How much truth lies in what we remember and in what we forget?
Doma documents the gradual farewell to my parents and my childhood home, a place full of ambivalence: comfort and pain, closeness and loss. The photographs capture everyday details, banal objects, quiet moments. They make the invisible perceptible: the smell of the kitchen, the creaking of the floor, the silence after death.
Doma documents the gradual farewell to my parents and my childhood home, a place full of ambivalence: comfort and pain, closeness and loss. The photographs capture everyday details, banal objects, quiet moments. They make the invisible perceptible: the smell of the kitchen, the creaking of the floor, the silence after death.
In the repetition of small gestures, a visual act of remembering takes shape. My images are fragments of a disappearing place and, at the same time, a reflection on how memory shapes identity and how images can help pre- serve a foundation that is no longer tangible.
