A Landslide (2016-2017)

 This project reflects on migration, cultural displacement, attempted assimilation and on reappropriation of one's identity. The metaphor of a "landslide" indicates a phenomenon of inner rupture due to the loss of pre-existing equilibrium.

 This work reveals my personal "failure" in adapting to the culture of the country, Italy, that I emigrated to twelve years ago from Russia. The trauma, difficult to overcome, has forced me to reconstruct a landscape I could connect too. Obsessive shooting on the streets of the Bologna neighbourhood where I live produced an unexpected result. A world of gazes, gestures, objects (a photographic inventory "of the excluded") looks much more like an Eastern European reality than an Italian one.

I reflect on the possibilities of overcoming an inner division between "old" and "new" identities. This division that society has forced me to experience isn't a part of my true self. Balancing myself between two universes I find my own stability by means of the construction of a new "citizenship" that I create through a mosaic of images that come together from two worlds to form one landscape.

 A Landslide is a photographic installation and a book consisting of 44 images.