kalma

Lots of my projects begin with dreams, the “kalma” project is no exception. At the end of 2022 , I had a dream in which I was a knight: weak- willed, motionless, barely alive. In attempt to materialize the image from this dream, to record the presence of a knight and to study it in more detail, I began searching for the character’s presence in the city.

I paid special attention to the area of ​​St. Petersburg in which the maximum presence of my hero was felt.

This is an area called Kolomna. According to one version, this name came from Finno-Ugric — “kalma“, which means grave, burial, cemetery. Hence the name of the project, and the mystical image of the island, on which the knight wanders. I'm talking about the knight who has already died, and perhaps more than once, in this project. The knight is a ghost, and I have taken the description of this concept from Quentin Meillassoux’s philosophical essay “The Spectral Dilemma”, where ghosts are those whose death we cannot come to terms with, we are talking about the death of children, victims of terrorist attacks, genocide, political purges, those who died a violent death.

A ghost is “a dead person who has not been properly mourned, haunting and disturbing us. He refuses to go to the “other world”, where the peacefully departed can accompany us at a distance sufficient for us to live our lives without forgetting them, but also without dying by their death, that is without being prisoners of a repeat of their final moments.” I show the life of the ghost knight in the transit zone, a place of exile and the expectations of all those people, whose names are still in captivity from the living.

4 metal panels, a book, textile artwork and metal objects are featured in the project.