Postcard Nowhere is a continuation of the project Letter to Mom about the stories of Belarusians who were forced to leave their homes in 2020-2021. Nadya Sayapina documents and ponders what it means not to be able to return home. Whereas other parts of the Letter to Mom project focused on the experience of relocation, the feeling of losing one's home, confusion and insecurity, the Postcard Nowhere series addresses the search for a lost home in a new place.
The artist asked people who left Belarus to take pictures of a place that reminds them their home visually or creates the same feeling of comfort, safety, and kinship. This is a researching of the practices of finding home in a foreign country, of trying to return at least on the level of feelings and associations in a situation where return is impossible.
Postcard Nowhere is a series of monochrome postcards based on the submitted photos. They feature nature and cities of different countries, non-tourist views. All images are created from the repeated phrase "I can choose any road except the road home" handwritten in the language of the country where the author(s) of the photo now live.These words are a fragment of an interview taken during the work on the first part of the cycle.
Text: Elisabeth Kovtiak.