my river

“My River” is a long-term photographic project (2018-2023) exploring identity formed under conditions of cultural and national erasure. Rooted in my family history along the River Nioman, the work grows from a personal question Who am I? shaped by life in a repressive environment where ancestral memory had to be hidden in order to survive.

The river becomes both archive and witness, a living guide carrying fragments of family memory, collective wounds, and processes of healing. Through it, I trace a lineage that exists not in monuments but in water, in its flow, its sediment, its erasures and returns. The river becomes a sense of home, where even its murky waters carry the memory of a pure source and the promise of renewal at its mouth.

Combining archival and contemporary photography in cyanotype prints, video, and text, “My River” unfolds in three states Riverbed, Source, River Mouth, mapping a non-linear time where origin and disappearance coexist. Within this current, the river becomes language, roots, and identity itself.

The consonance of the blue colour of the cyanotype and the blue reflection of the sky in the water turns the exhibition into a river of our collective memory, flowing alongside the ancient shores towards the eternal sea, where freedom awaits all.

The My River project includes:

3 photographic series made in the technique of manual photographic alternative printing, Cyanotype (total 52 artworks):

• Riverbed

• Source

• River mouth

2 short films:

• My River (8:45 min)

Music performed and written by Roberto Gavazzi "My Sacred Forest", "Amygdala"

DoP: Andrei Voskresenski, Maria Elena Bonet

• Radonitsa (1:25 min)

DoP: Maria Elena Bonet

Light installation

Riverbed begins with a question Who am I?

I was born in a land where people learned to hide the memory of their ancestors in order to survive. Hidden so deeply, it turns into oblivion and takes away the sense of identity.

I grew up on the River Nioman, where generations of my family had lived. Every house in the village faced the river. The need to root led me to a hole in the family memory. I saw the river through this hole.

The starting point of the project was a photograph of my great-grandfather in a uniform with a sabre. I made a self-portrait and placed myself next to him. In this gesture, time collapsed. It became an entry into a space where past and present exist together.

Listening to Nioman’s voice created a vocabulary of images, my mother tongue. I express myself in art in the language I communicate with the river.

The Nioman water carries the memory of our family. This energy passes from person to person as a way of life and as faith. Shared love for the river and the sense of freedom it nurtures form a continuous lineage.

The river current carried away imposed points of view and nurtured vision. The living presence of water in the body awakened the desire to rise and walk, above all to walk inside myself.

I often found myself drawn into the river’s whirl, its pupil, a portal from which I could only return changed. It formed a state of transition between death and resurrection that accompanied my growing up.

The culture of the river has the beginning and the end in my blood. My present choices influence the past as much as the future. Each personal choice creates a shared history, like a part of the riverbed shapes the entire river.

in the beginning was the river

Nioman

his depth revealed me mine

he brought me up

The atmosphere of the river creates such a rhythm, that in the midst of this element one becomes part of it. The dance of the stream is born, always different, but monotonous. It is the dance of time, the dance with time. I float beside it, I float in it and against it, until time completely disappears in me, until time becomes me. The one invited to dance with the river becomes the dance.

In the Source series i assembled the photos of uprooted trees from the Neman’s banks with archival photos of my ancestors as children. In one of the pictures I appear as child next to uprooted cherry blossom. I worked on these pictures during a peaceful revolution in Belarus that was brutally suppressed. This series is a response to the lifelong pain I feel for my homeland. Yet, it is a hopefull response: seeds will sprout under the uprooted stump when the time comes, just like free people are born in a country banished by years of violence. Thus, the river led me to the vision of my personal state, the one of a flying tree, whose seeds have been cast into the grief-stricken land. My broken roots return to the source, trying to grow again, to flow again. Time after time after time…

The series absorbed the meaning of the river as a symbol of natural aspiration of human spirit to freedom, like that of the river to the sea. This metaphor found its reflection in the peaceful protests in Belarus in 2020, when rivers of people marched towards their sea of freedom. This metaphor finds its reflection in a photo where people all together with lights in their hands, form a luminous river, like the milky way. The Belarusians, in a single rush, merged into a river and became light themselves. When it became so dark in Belarus that one could see no stars, we began to see them in each other's hearts.

Reaching the river mouth is the ability to be alive, not to tur n one’s river into standing water. The key to the sea is in the form of the four -leaf clover. A legend says, Eve took this plant as a memento of her lost home, Paradise. Just a s the river carries the memory of the spring in its quest to turn into the sea, so people carry their given freedom to its fulfillment.