There Round the Corner in the Deep
The story centers on the mythology of Sarov, a closed city where I grew up. During the Cold War, the city disappeared from maps, and the figure of a saint-hermit who once lived there was replaced by a nuclear physicist. Hidden in dense forests, it became the birthplace of the hydrogen bomb. Today, the Russian government and the Church use both Orthodoxy and nuclear technology in their propaganda as a symbol of power and oppression. The boundary between fact and fiction becomes increasingly blurred. In 2022, Russia started a new phase of global confrontation, evoking a sense of an invisible threat and uncovering a future full of uncertainty.
The forest, a central motif throughout the project, acts as both scene and metaphor. Referencing Pasternak’s poetry and the Strugatsky brothers’ science fiction, it becomes a symbolic space of the unknown, where memory mutates, histories dissolve, and futures emerge in fragments. Rather than documenting historical continuity, the project unveils rupture and contradiction. Faith and militarism, science and myth, secrecy and speculation coexist in suspended time. In this temporal dissonance, I attempt to articulate the experience of living within a nonlinear and politically charged landscape.
My grandfather was one of the scientists involved in the nuclear program. I never knew him, but inherited his archive of film negatives. Due to strict secrecy, his photographs lack direct documentation, depicting only family and nature, but marked by traces of anxiety—scratches, burnt spots, and mold. By weaving together his archive with my photographs based on facts and legends, I investigate the shifting boundaries between fact and fiction, inviting the viewer to reflect on the cyclical nature of myth, power, and secrecy.
