“Svetlana” is an ongoing body of work exploring the transformation of grief — from the sense of a definitive rupture to the discovery of another form of presence, a subtler and less obvious way of remaining in contact with someone who is gone.

My mother was a scholar of Nabokov’s work. When she died — too young, at forty — his understanding of death became a source of solace for me.

Vladimir Nabokov does not oppose death to life. For him, death is not an end but a door into another, more intimate dimension — one passes through it as through a turnstile and finds oneself in a magical reality for which life was merely a preparation. No one ceases to exist: they simply disappear from our field of vision. Dying becomes a metamorphosis — the chrysalis of the body transforming into a butterfly, a true birth. Nabokov’s otherworld is a realm of light: solar, luminous spaces, infinite smiling worlds, iridescent, shimmering spheres.

By a remarkable coincidence, my mother’s name, Svetlana, means “light,” and I use it as both a visual and conceptual anchor. I work with glimmers, reflections, sparkles, trying, following Nabokov, to strip death of its dark halo. I try to move beyond rational perception and intuitively grasp the shape of inaccessible, unknowable worlds.

In “Svetlana”, through the search for — or the creation of — fleeting, magical micro-events, I build a new form of intimacy with my mother. The more attentive the gaze becomes to these subtle occurrences, the more stable the sense of connection grows.