Untold Fairytale

Self-portraiture series about searching for identity in the first years of unexpected emigration, creating a fairytale imaginary world for my children, preserving sanity through creativity, imagination, and family collaboration.

The sudden and unwanted emigration wrenched me from calm and comfortable life of a middle-aged architect into the one of an exile in a new land. In these times, I turned to photography as a way of holding my family together, of inventing meaning where certainty was gone.

In the midst of this chaos, I began constructing a private, fairy-tale world hidden from prying eyes, which only my two daughters have access to. The world where the boundaries of possibility dissolve, the feminine fantasyland sprung from the bedtime tales mothers weave for their children. But this world is riddled with deep homesickness.

In our fantasyland, nothing is permanent. Everything shifts, transforms. Mother, witch, queen; daughter-girl, daughter-child, daughter-doll—each character blending into the next, caught in a constant state of transformation. There is no fixed point, only the shimmering transitions between them. And no end here, even a happy one. The darkness of the outer, unfriendly, foreign world gathers at the edges of each image, yet it cannot extinguish the light the three of us create ourselves.

We transform through European folktales archetypes, haunted, mystical, grotesque, yet the characters and scenes do not replicate any existing stories, our fairytale is still untold.

This work is my means of coping with the despondency and fear of emigration. It is also a opportunity to share play with my daughters and leave them with lasting memories of the time we spent together during this difficult chapter of our lives. This is one of the ways of being a woman and a mother in a quickly collapsing world.