It so happened that over the past few years, only my mother and several distant relatives have survived from my family. The experience of death and stress that I have experienced over the past few years multiplied by the stress of war. Ant it gave me the impetus to create a posthumous family album describing the life and death of my close relatives through artistic language, revealing multiple political and social aspects of a post-Soviet society, through personal history.

 

The album will consist of several parts, each of which will be dedicated to one of the relatives - their life and the circumstances of their death. 

 

Reflecting on the deaths of my relatives, I realized that through this art project I can show the scale of the catastrophe existing in the society of post-Soviet countries. The scale of the destruction of the humanistic community.  For example, through the example of my sister who died suddenly of AIDS - a diagnosis that we learned a few days before her death, she hid because of the stigmatization of the disease in society. As well as her drug addiction, which we learned about a year after her death. Or through the story of my uncle, a homosexual alcoholic man who lived his whole life and died alone. The story of my Latvian grandfather who was shot by Stalin because of fictional “espionage”, and in fact for taking away a large apartment in the center of St. Petersburg (now the Gazprom Oil office is located in the house). And there are a few more similar stories affecting the fate of my relatives from Ukraine, Russia and Latvia. 

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