THE SEA OF LOST MEMORY. ACESS DENIED
2026
The project “The Sea of Lost Memory. Access Denied” engages with the theme of collective and personal memory as an unstable, fragile archive that cannot be fully fixed or preserved - neither on physical media nor in the digital cloud.
At the core of the project is a found roll of photographic film that my parents left undeveloped in an analog camera approximately 20 years ago. In 2025, I received this camera and developed the film, which revealed fragments of my childhood that I no longer remember, just as I do not remember the exact time when the photographs were taken. Some of these images were made in Crimea - a place that is now occupied and physically inaccessible, yet continues to exist in memory.
These accidentally preserved images became the starting point for reflections on the nature of memory. Memory is fragmentary and unreliable, similar to a dream: after waking, only certain images remain while the rest disappear. From a physiological perspective, memory has no single storage location; it exists as a network of connections between neurons, distributed across different regions of the brain. A recollection is reconstructed each time it is remembered and slightly altered with every act of remembering. Without a material trace, many moments could vanish forever.
Within the project “The Sea of Lost Memory. Access Denied”, the photographs are printed using the cyanotype technique - a fragile and impermanent process that is difficult to conserve. The prints are placed into glass bottles filled with saline solutions of varying concentrations. Some bottles contain water with a salt concentration identical to that of the Black Sea; others contain a solution with the same salt proportion as human blood. This simultaneously refers to the salty water of the Black Sea, part of which is currently inaccessible due to occupation, and to the occupation of Donbas: for the solution I use salt from the mines of Soledar, whose extraction was halted in April 2022 (for the first time since the Second World War) due to shelling by the Russian army.
During the exhibition process, the images gradually deteriorate under the influence of salt and water. The speed and character of this degradation vary, just as the mechanisms of memory’s disappearance differ. The project has no fixed final state, as the images continue to be destroyed over time. It is an ephemeral attempt to capture experiences, memories, and places that are no longer physically accessible, yet continue to live in collective and personal memory.
