“The black night calls my name” engages with a personal bodily archive — the physical imprint of Russia’s chaotic “wild nineties.” This archive is approached as a site of unresolved and deeply ambivalent somatic knowledge, where contradictory states are held in a tense coexistence.

The nineties in Russia were a decade of total social collapse following the dissolution of the USSR, when chaos, aggression, and pervasive lawlessness became the new everyday reality. I lived through that era as a child. Too young to rationally comprehend what was happening, I experienced it on a physical level — through anxiety, vulnerability, hypervigilance. The imagery of this period is primarily rooted in my body rather than in my mind. Memory returns as bodily flashes, which the project articulates through self-portraiture.

My work questions whether trauma might also function as an environment where vulnerability seeds a hidden potential for violence — a force internalized within traumatized perception, its shadow side. To convey this ambivalence, I work with the duality of images: the same frame can hold both fragility and a latent, oppressive threat.

I have not returned to Russia since 2022, and the project was shot in Europe. The absence of Russia’s visual landscape became a productive constraint, shifting the search from historical iconography to immediate somatic triggers. This turn confirmed that the archive is not tied to place, but persists as a self-sustaining system of bodily memory — active and portable.

This project considers how the legacy of the past continues to operate in the present. Rather than nostalgia for the nineties, I am interested in their ongoing, often unconscious presence — and in how acknowledging this persistence may help trace the roots of current realities.