07_Compulsive mourning homes
2024
I remember that as a child, I tried to draw a floor plan of the apartment where I lived with my parents. Recently, I suddenly started doing the same thing again. But this time, I began sketching the last place I lived in before emigrating from Russia. At first, I made a drawing of just one, but then I began recalling the apartment where I lived with my parents in my childhood, and eventually, I did every apartment I’ve ever lived in throughout my life. It turned out there were just ten in total.
The process turned out to be quite painful, a meticulous sifting through fragments of memories within me that I had long forgotten and didn’t even realize were still there. Now, when I look at these drawings, I feel a little warmer, as if these homes are now right here at my fingertips.
All the apartments I sketched are places I considered home. Places where I spent only a short time or that, for some reason, didn’t feel like home to me are not included. The drawings show only the objects that etched themselves into my memory and encapsulate the stories of my life around them. All the doors are drawn in the position they were most often left open. Throughout my life in each of these apartments, objects moved around the space, but I depicted them as they were most firmly fixed in my memory.
All the drawings were created based on the sensations of the spaces, without any additional information or precise measurements. The plans show only the internal contours of the apartments, with any objects or spaces appearing beyond these internal boundaries only if they hold a direct emotional connection to the inner home.
The exhibition was held in my apartment in Tbilisi on the 3rd of May, 2024. I arranged the works on the walls of the living room in the circular manner, starting with the first apartment that I can remember placed higher than the rest. To be able to look at it, visitors had to climb the stairs. This was a deliberate choice on my part, as I wanted to emulate the difficulty of reaching that memory by making a person phisycally climb to it. The other works were arranged in chronological order in suitable parts of the room, and the room itself eventually influenced the narrative and the dialogue between the pieces.
The first apartment at the top of the stairs stood alone as the first and the most unreachable one. The other nine apartments were arranged as three triptychs, each representing a different stage of my life: the first triptych of living with my parents; the second, the start of the independent life in Moscow (with the brief setback of returning to my parents’ house); and the third, living in exile. The drawing of the last apartment, which is my current home and where the exhibition was held, was placed horisontally on the table in the centre of the room to resemble a map and to distinguish it from the other works as it is not a memory, but the present.
