"The less memory is internally experienced, the more it needs external support and tangible points of reference in which and only through which it exists. Hence the obsession with archives typical of our days, influencing at the same time both the complete preservation of the present and the complete preservation of the entire past. A sense of the rapid and final disappearance of memory is mixed with anxiety about the exact meaning of the present and uncertainty about the future in order to give the most insignificant remains, the most confusing testimonies, a visual dignity of remembering." Pierre Nora, "The Problematics of Memory Sites. 

The memory of the Great Patriotic War has long been firmly sewn into the civil identity of the Russian citizen. One instinctively wants to forget the hard memories of the war. And one wants to accentuate the bright and joyful ones. It is as if I am working with the fabric of the memory of the commonality with the fabric of black and white war photography. Some photos are first torn, as if in an attempt to remove from memory, and then stitched together, restored. For without the memory of trauma, it is impossible to create a conscious future. Some photographs depicting scenes of recreation or everyday life in the war are "decorated" with embroidery. The entire canvas of black and white photographs is permeated by a single red thread, as a metaphor for a through, underlying motif. And it is all-permeating - life and art. 

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