The conscious awareness or sensation of a physical environment, region, or location is commonly referred to as a "sense of place." This includes the emotional response to a place as well as its physical nature. The places that I consider special and visit are not always the most beautiful at first glance. However, my emotional connection with them allows me to imagine them in this way and on different levels, just like the first visitor does.
Our dacha in Belarus became such a place for me. When our daughters were born, my husband and I bought a small house on the banks of the Viliya River. This was also the village where my husband often spent his holidays as a child. Arriving there
I created my photo archive, shaping the future processes of remembering my daughters.
When I found archival photographs of my husband’s family in this particular place, it seemed to me that the point is not only that we experience ourselves in some place, in a specific space and time, but in the place itself. The place has become a hero uniting different generations. The sense of place of the past seems to be in dialogue with the present, and perhaps even with the future, seeking to ensure its reproduction.
By combining archival and contemporary photographs, I reflect how the same place holds memories for different generations. Archives have become mobile, and memory is realized as a process that can be revised and updated.
Images of past objects stored in memory also call into question the way our memories are constructed and the connection between the sense of place and the sense of the object.
By mixing archival photographs, adding still lifes of memorable objects, I reconnect space and time.