Who are the Germans?

Several classes at once conducted together with social worker Vera Kravchik, artist Yana Smetanina, photographer Anastasia Khoroshilova and art therapist Olga Michaels.

Our task is to create a joint collective project (we call it “napkins”), memory cards. Memory cards include records, archival materials shared by project participants, photographs of their relatives, the places where they worked and lived.

I also integrated the visual materials into the maps that I found on the Internet.

It is very important that the project is not the production of napkins or any production of things at all. After all, there are already too many things in our world, is it true? Our task is to create a relationship. Relations between older class members, many of whom feel forgotten and alienated, relationships between artists, photographers, and social researchers.

But the main thing that seems important is the joint work of artists and class participants. These are the notes that we make together, these are the memories that remain part of the “napkin”.

Our napkin is almost 6 meters in size and printed on a thick transparent tracing paper. Therefore, it is very convenient to stick to it other materials, also printed on tracing paper. Overlaying texts, photographs, drawings and notes on top of each other, we organize a complex texture of the visual and social image.