Gold & mushrooms
photography and some more art from Alexandra Soldatova
Our Trip
2015 - 2018
A photo album in leather binding, posts in Instagram and gigabytes of photos somewhere far in the depths of the hard drive. All these pictures that, willy-nilly, together with the rest of the people in the past and the present, we create either to remember, or simply because we can no longer imagine the journey without documentation.
Perhaps the album is a peculiar way to celebrate - an event, the completion of a stage, a transition or simply the presence of something. This is a special holiday creation, a document of memory, a document of the fact that this memory exists.
It (the album) operates on the territory of the most personal, intimate. But nevertheless, it is created
Perhaps the album is a peculiar way to celebrate - an event, the completion of a stage, a transition or simply the presence of something. This is a special holiday creation, a document of memory, a document of the fact that this memory exists.
It (the album) operates on the territory of the most personal, intimate. But nevertheless, it is created
with some kind of an eye on "how it should be" and, in the paradigm of the ideal. According to unspoken rules that have nothing to do with the reality of events at a particular moment in time, but simulates a general sense of happiness and the importance of what is happening on a segment of life.
So what about the photography? What is its role here and, does it actually hide emotions, placing pictures in a certain sequence or, perhaps, removing unnecessary ones? Is there a grammar that we use to create a chronicle of joyful events, "special" travels? Yes and no. I believe that photography creates new constructions in which one can find the traces of reality by putting yourself in the place of the smiling one.
So what about the photography? What is its role here and, does it actually hide emotions, placing pictures in a certain sequence or, perhaps, removing unnecessary ones? Is there a grammar that we use to create a chronicle of joyful events, "special" travels? Yes and no. I believe that photography creates new constructions in which one can find the traces of reality by putting yourself in the place of the smiling one.
To Boris, for a good memory!
From our gigantic mountains.
(2017)
From our gigantic mountains.
(2017)
Our Trip. June 1956/January 2016.
(2016)
(2016)
Late at night а photo album was melting in my hands. The sheets of cardboard were turning into waves, the glue, destroyed by the flea market fog in Brussels, was dissolving and the photographs were sticking off the pages.
It is the album seen as a story, as travel records - a holiday spent by a young Belgian couple in Mallorca in 1956. They had one camera for two, they were photographing each other, at the same place they bought the album and after returning home filled it in with the photographs.
The pictures seemed too simple to me, and the album itself - full of clichés and thus boring, but at the same time it was a bit enviable and genuine – a document of happiness, a finished product, made clearly to remember it forever.
It is the album seen as a story, as travel records - a holiday spent by a young Belgian couple in Mallorca in 1956. They had one camera for two, they were photographing each other, at the same place they bought the album and after returning home filled it in with the photographs.
The pictures seemed too simple to me, and the album itself - full of clichés and thus boring, but at the same time it was a bit enviable and genuine – a document of happiness, a finished product, made clearly to remember it forever.
I wanted to do something that might in the same way capture, pin with a needle my own happiness to a specific moment in time. I decided to use the 60-years-old rules of the game: photographs, postures, places.
It is a simple game that at the body level takes me out of the definite moment of the document into the space of alien relations, so similar to any other ones. The more I transform, the more scrupulously I observe and participate in each photograph, the more obvious substitution becomes, a strange old game and the falseness of the entire structure on the whole. Action and its tangible result make something that was obvious at the very beginning real and we are forced to accept it.
It is a simple game that at the body level takes me out of the definite moment of the document into the space of alien relations, so similar to any other ones. The more I transform, the more scrupulously I observe and participate in each photograph, the more obvious substitution becomes, a strange old game and the falseness of the entire structure on the whole. Action and its tangible result make something that was obvious at the very beginning real and we are forced to accept it.
All.
(2018)
(2018)
