Find a shadow on a Saturday afternoon

It’s easy to forget what you didn’t know, much harder to remember what he didn’t know. It is even more difficult to remember what you did not know, but other people remembered and told you. People and events that are not directly related to us, but are told by our relatives, become our own memory. Relatives who cannot be spoken of because they did something “bad”. Events that need to be remembered are “like” because that’s how it “was” in fact. Most likely, each participant in the event has his own truth, his own traumatic experience. Often these experiences are opposite.

The artist Eugenia Ignatova in the total installation “Finding a Shadow on a Saturday Noon” is trying to figure out how it works like family mythology becomes our memories.

Shinkunas Pyotr Andreevich was born in Lithuania, and presumably died near Ladoga already as Shashunov Pyotr Andreevich. Of the dates of birth and death, only the year is known. One grandmother claims that he wanted to be engaged in publishing, the other that he wanted to become a sailor. There are almost no photographs preserved, there are few letters and fragments of memoirs of relatives.

This is a kind of quest in which Eugenia offers to put together a puzzle of people and events based on family stories and archival photographs and unravel the mystery of her great-grandfather’s existence.

Text: Sasha K. curator