Dirigible

Dirigible resignifies early twentieth century military photographs from my family archive. The work reflects on displacement, memory and the human drive for power, revealing the tension between technological progress and violence.

Dirigible is a series built from photographs taken by my great grandfather Vadim in the early twentieth century, when he was assigned to pilot dirigibles from England to Russia. The images, technical and military in nature, reveal both the fascination and the violence of human progress, a technology capable of creating massive structures that fly while also destroying and killing. From these original photographs, I propose a narrative reconfiguration that brings the punctum, the detail once marginal, to the center of the composition, creating new readings and symbolic layers.

The work emerged after gathering my family’s photographic archive, found in my grandparents’ house after their death. Among the remnants, the images revealed trajectories of displacement: my great grandparents left Russia during the 1917 Revolution, passed through Turkey, Belgium, France, Uruguay, Argentina and Paraguay, where my grandmother was born, before settling in Brazil. This journey, shared by many twentieth century families, is inscribed in the photographs as a testimony to geopolitics shaped by rupture, loss and reconstruction.

In Dirigible I work with these traces not as historical documents but as signs of a recurring imagination, the human desire for expansion and control, and its dialogue with the fantastic. The original images of men measuring the perimeter of bombs, smoke and metallic structures are given new life through reframing and editing, revealing both their formal beauty and the weight of engaging with instruments of war, with ambiguity always present in human history.

The dirigible, the series central motif, appears as a hybrid creature, machine and animal, symbol of both dream and destruction. Suspended between sky and earth, it mirrors the condition of displacement that defines much of human experience, the constant movement between belonging and estrangement. Dirigible transforms the archive into poetic fiction and reflects on the repetition of the human condition through conflicts driven by power.