It’s said that the universe always makes a sound, but we cannot hear it because we are born in it.
I was born in the year when my country ceased to exist and became another country. Just as my dad taught our dog to bark his last name syllable by syllable, so did my country learn to be called a different name and live in a new way. I was simply learning to live in the place where I was born.
These days I think more and more about what my parents and teachers put into defining me as “good” or “bad.” How much of “me” was in a snowflake costume at a New Year’s Eve party in the kindergarten or at the church service with my grandmother. How much “me” was at school assembly in a brown dress with a white apron, how much was at the seasonal potato harvest down in the country, how much was at the family holiday with the chimes announcing the beginning of a new year, how much “me” are there in each step of the bright green entrance hall of our five-story condo?
More often I think about what are the actor of my statements and the true agents of intentions? Thoughts are dependent on a system of linguistic, cultural and social rules. To feel means to manifest true experiences and unconsciously transmit meanings. Who is the author of signs, symbols, codes, precise structures, templates? Just a flickering portrait of the motives and reasons accumulated by memory and consciousness to do one way and not the other. Perhaps I am only a part of a collective formed by time, where it is no longer possible to define the boundaries of personal contribution and highlight one’s own “I”.

All images ©Yanova Katya