Black Velvet

I started filming the project in Moscow because the Russian-Ukrainian war made me angry. I wanted to understand: do Russian citizens really support the war, or is it just a propaganda myth?

It is not known for sure what the letters “Z” and “V” stand for, but they became a symbols of war used by Russian civilians to indicate support for the Ukrainian invasion. Although no one knows the true meaning behind these symbols, people in Russia still use them, buy goods with them, and include these letters in their nicknames and bio information on social media services.

After moving to the other country, I lost almost all of the photos I'd taken for the project over the past year. I managed to restore some of the photos in low resolution and then upscaled the images 4-16 times using neural networks. These neural algorithms became my co-authors: they “imagined” and added some parts of the photos, but tried to keep the main things visible and mostly untouched.

Since the war that Russia is waging over Ukraine is as meaningless as its main pro-war symbols, even neural networks cannot make sense of it and struggle to reconstruct these images.

So I draw a parallel: first lost, then restored and reconstructed, these photographs are like a fading memory of my country. They're like a surreal, bizarre caricature, where you can see a relative, but can't really recognize him. Like when I look at my homeland — and can't recognize it.