Laktionova
Director, Editor, Visual artist
Untitled
Untitled is an attempt to explore the processes related to remembering through photography. I'm not trying to preserve anything through photography, but rather to create an ideal void that gives space to the process of remembering and forgetting. Like this title Untitled, which is both a title and at the same time does not name anything.
In an endeavor to understand these processes, I wrote this text, which fits this series of photos:
“I think of forgetting and remembering as dying and being born. When I die, my mother's shell remains around me. That shell does not die with me. The shell of my mother's mother did not die either. The infinity of mothers goes on forever and never ends. It connects me to the vast nothing filled with the shells of dead mothers. But THAT is everything. Infinite everything. Filled and empty at the same time. I am filled and empty at the same time.”
The idea of this project was born out of the acceptance that I will never see the city of my childhood, Mariupol, the way I remember it. Or I might never see it at all. After all, it was completely destroyed and captured by Russia in 2022 during the Russian-Ukrainian war.