Series - FotoSlovo 2026 - Category « Fine Art »

I step out of my building and head toward the subway, taking a shortcut through the courtyards. I descend into the station and inhale the scent: thick, industrial, familiar. Unlike everything else, it hasn’t changed since childhood. My mind runs through the usual route: should I get off at "Ploshchad 1905" or "Dinamo"? As always, I choose Dinamo.

I’ll walk past my university, I’ll buy that 'Orekhovoye' pastry at the “Kosmos” deli.

This is nothing but a dream. My imperfect, gritty, and sometimes anxious city that lives inside me, even as it’s being eroded by other memories. I haven’t been home in nearly five years; my recollections are no longer enough, they’ve worn thin. I collect and preserve what remains on the beautiful velvet shelves of my dresser.

My distance from the world didn’t begin with my immigration ten years ago; it started at the very beginning of my life. I grew up in a family where I had “too blonde hair” or was “too loud”, “too emotionally sensitive”. My hair was a physical marker of this “otherness", and my emotions were an inconvenience. I was scolded for my feelings, so I began to hide them inside. I was a stranger even at home, the one place where, by definition, I should have belonged.

"Exit at Dinamo" is a project about the sensation of "detachment" between the country where I live and the country where I was born. This “detachment," this sense of alienation and dissociation, is not a temporary state but a permanent way of existing.