ANASTASIA BOGOMOLOVA
‘Recall’
For the last four years I have been studying the story of my family, again and again building upon my relatives’ pictures. I’ve been showing these old photographs to my kith and kin and incessantly making them reminisce some other details, reconstruct events in their memory, reiterate the same old tales. Eventually, though, the picture of my folks’ lives has not cleared up. At some moment I was under an impression that I was looking into a dark deep well, trying to make out the reflection from its bottom, but the mirror of the water had been disturbed ever and anon by the stones relentlessly falling from above, and there were rings in the water.
As long as the memory itself lives and remains flexible, as long as it is not petrified, there is not a single chance at trying to bring to a halt this flood of recalls and capture images frozen in time. Faces of the past — past youths, lived and forgotten lives – never freeze forever. Images of the past, images of the whole generations of a family — they get farther away from the present, they are constantly revived in our multiple recollections – and they change relentlessly. Some of the features are erased; some of them come back to surface. Again and again we address our own and other’s memory and we have to finish writing family stories and to touch-up portraits of our own relatives.
© Anastasia Bogomolova