15.1.09

Solveig. Landscape of My Memory






Solveig. Landscape of My Memory
Installation, 2004, video, salt, wood, acrylic glass,
250 х 230 cm; sound: E. Grieg, Solveig’s Song

Memory is a desert that we people with the imagination.

In the landscape of my memory one can see a small town in the Urals Region, factory chimneys, a snow-bound pond and a small figure of a boy going to school along a narrow path through the snowfield. I take this path to travel into the past and to restore by time spots the ideal universe, in which childhood is the time of spiritual depths and infinitely dazzling white snow. Time spots are clearly discernible in the snowy landscape of my memory – Father bringing in a Christmas tree on a sledge, Mother rinsing linen in a black ice-hole, a small house on the shore of the pond, a horse and cart, a haystack, my brothers, dogs, fishermen and passers-by, a small cave in the snow, an angel in the snow-drift and the cemetery. Snow is the time and the white imagined landscape where I lodge my personal memories. It is there, on the barely seen line of the snow horizon, that the earthly and transcendental spheres come together.

Leonid Tishkov