nativ|al #79

2022

Recycled plastic/Found object

A birch trunk, found in a Belarusian forest and relocated to Russia, retraces the journey of the artist’s family. Its “digital roots"—plastic mushrooms with satellite-dish caps, 3D-printed from recycled bottles—symbolize an attempt to reconstruct lost connections through technological mediation. Intentional printing flaws (glitches, imperfections) underscore the impossibility of truly replacing physical artifacts with their digital copies—even when the originals remain abroad, separated by both ideological and national borders.

My grandfather from a Belarusian family, who moved to Kuibyshev city. In March 1945, at the age of 18, he was drafted to the front, where he served as a bomber pilot until the end of the war, evacuating many wounded. Afterwards he got married, settled down with his family in Nikolaev in southern Ukraine. There, my uncle and father — his sons remained. My aunt and then I and my family moved to Sevastopol and after the events of 2014, we ended up in Russia. Now, contact with relatives on the other side of the border is especially difficult: due to both objective reasons and ideological differences with my parents. Almost all the family archive remained there: the photographs of the grandfather, great-grandparents and great-grandmothers. Their letters and some personal items.

I am very sorry that when my grandfather was still alive, I was too young and do not remember his stories about the past well. Now it is especially difficult to collect this information: my uncle and his wife send scans of photos, letters. But I have no material artifacts. And I am very afraid that they may be lost forever. And I don’t believe in the long-term preservation of their digital copies.