ARRIVE WITHOUT LEAVING, 2023

These pictures were shot on the Kola Peninsula in the Lovozero tundra. The Sami lived there for a long time, and they called these lands Luyavrurt, which means a “mountain near a stormy lake”. Traditionally, the Sami believed that all significant natural objects, such as stones, plants, rivers, have a soul.

Left alone with the lake, I walked along the shore and couldn’t stop at all. The only line that I happened to write down in my diary at that time was — to find my place.

Once we go in search of our place, we may never return. We can wander through the labyrinths of the forest, get lost in the thick grass, swim across a cold river, crawl up the slope without seeing the top. As Andrei Tarkovsky said, “there is only one type of journey possible: the one in which we go to our inner world.”

For me, photography is the missing point that connects the visible with the invisible. The connection between the landscape and the inner state. Between love and despair. I believe that we take pictures because we want to be closer to places and objects, as well as to ourselves. Finding your place in the landscape is one of the forms of intimacy.