Kastornoe

This series of photographs is about Kastornoe, in the Kursk Region, Russia, which is the native place of my father. I used to go there when I was a child, both with my father and my grandmother; so, it’s a bit of a nostalgic work about memories, childhood, about the flow of time. I had a desire to go back there as an adult for the first time, (and the first time in about ten years), to go on my own, to meet my relatives, to see if there is still anything of what my father and grandmother told me about, of what I saw and remember myself.

I wanted to see a small drying up river where I went to swim, a pond where my father would fish as a boy. It happened naturally that one of my focuses, unlike in some other projects of mine about Russia, was not on poor people or people having problems with alcohol, but on children playing, swimming, enjoying life in spite of surrounding poverty. It is about joy and misery at the same time; what I saw there made me think about the circumstances of human life and death, the short and fugitive period of childhood, sometimes unspoiled by reality, however severe.