The Three of Us

This project reimagines a secret Soviet experiment to conquer death, producing three cloned girls. They are both fictional characters and metaphors for fractured identities, navigating the echoes of collapsed systems and histories that never let go.

This mockumentary project grows out of an overlooked chapter of Soviet history: the belief that death could be conquered. After the 1917 Revolution, Bolsheviks imagined not only a new society but a new humanity - one freed from illness, aging, and mortality. Inspired by the philosopher Nikolai Fedorov, they treated resurrection not as metaphor but as a technical and moral duty. Scientific and philosophical texts openly discussed ressurecting the dead and engineering eternal life.

The work imagines an alternative scenario in which one late-Soviet immortality experiment quietly succeeds. The program’s goal was to perfect cloning in preparation for the eventual resurrection of Vladimir Lenin as living proof of the system’s triumph. Instead, its only viable outcome was three cloned girls: unintended, unclaimed, and without a clear purpose. When the USSR collapsed, so did the structures that sustained them. Left without guidance, they were forced to navigate a reality they were never meant to inherit.

The project draws on the artist’s biography: born in the USSR, shaped by its collapse, and repeatedly redefined through migration. Each move produced a new version of the self - split, translated, and partially erased. The three clones become both fictional characters and living metaphors for fractured identity, ideological afterlife, and the instability of belonging.