HELP ME TO RETURN TO THE PLACES THAT STILL FEEL FAMILIAR, 2025-ONGOING

The death of my beloved became the starting point for a work in which loss is seen not as an ending, but as a shift in the forms of presence. The key metaphor here is the path, the route: movement becomes a way of speaking with absence, an attempt to sustain connection where familiar forms are no longer possible.

My route follows the Smorodinka River in the forest. Its name echoes another river, the mythical Smorodina, a pivotal river of East Slavic tales and a symbol of the boundary between the world of the living and the world of the dead, an analogue of the ancient Greek Styx. The juxtaposition of the real and the mythical rivers allows the documentary and the archetypal to stand side by side: the topography of grief and the universal image of transition.

The landscape here is not a passive backdrop but a companion and a vessel of traces. It both preserves and conceals the imprints of experience, creating a space for reflection on memory, which is rarely stable: it resists disappearance, its credibility remains under tension. A two-channel video, filmed back in the city near the place of death, records the path of two people—two worlds that no longer intersect.

At the core of the work lies the question of how we build communication with those who have departed: what means of testimony and what forms of memory remain available, effective. There is no illusion of saving the past here, only an attempt to capture its possibility—that which allows us to say: it was. What remains? Love, caught off guard by its own impossibility to endure. It lingers as an echo in the place where once two voices spoke. To love means, at some point, to learn to love absence.