Around and about

Over the years, I kept coming back to memories of the family dacha. Hearing the smell of our wooden house in other houses, longing for tea from the samovar and the pile of granite stones opposite, which I used to go through in search of treasures. In the place where the dacha was, I felt a strong unity with myself, my parents and my grandmother. With the world around me. As a child, I liked to go to the end of the road that led to the dacha house and look curiously around the uncharted corner. I cherished the memorable fragments even when I grew up and my grandmother was gone, and joint trips to the dacha became a thing of the past.

I endow the image of the dacha with experiential meaning. When the new owners demolished the house, I realized that I had lost something more than a physical object. Even in the family archive, I found no images of the dacha. Only photographs of the plot.

To reconstruct the symbols of the past and to feel like a child again, like a pilgrim, I went with my camera to the village where the dacha stood. The archive photo acts as a guide to memories that change with me and take on additional meanings.