West Of The Birch Trees

West Of The Birch Trees explores the construction of identity within contexts of migration and displacement through a photographic, textual, and moving-image practice.

West Of The Birch Trees explores the construction of identity within contexts of migration and displacement through a photographic and textual practice. The project interrogates the notion of “home” when it is no longer a stable place but a fragile, ongoing negotiation shaped by geopolitical conflict, housing insecurity, and the lack of intergenerational rootedness.

Developed between Spain and Ukraine since 2024, the work is structured around returns to the artist’s birthplace, which functions simultaneously as metaphor and method to examine diasporic identity. Rejecting linear documentation, the project unfolds cyclically, using repetition as central visual and structural motifs that reflect the non-linear nature of memory. Photography functions as a relational practice of “being-with,” embracing proximity and attention while questioning framing, distance, and authorship. Within this framework, the body is not always a visible subject but understood as a mediator between personal experience and political realities.

Formally, new photographs are combined with archival and materials to create layered dialogues between personal experience and collective histories. The latter have been carefully intervened upon to redirect the attention from who is pictured to what surrounds them. The resulting images preserve their information while loosening their attachment to specific identities, allowing broader forms of recognition and situating personal material within wider social and historical contexts. Two videos are included, presented without caption or context and placed in deliberate contrast. One is a domestic recording from 1997 in Russia; the other is recent smartphone footage documenting the Ukraine’s invasion. Placed in dialogue, they operate across different temporalities, geographies, and conditions of image production.

The project is a practice of circling the elusive spaces between memory and image, belonging and estrangement. It does not seek to reclaim a lost past but to confront the absences within it, articulating that void through a layered visual and textual language. Ultimately, West of the Birch Trees argues that the autobiographical act itself can become a form of belonging—through cyclical retelling, retranslation, re-orientation, and the radical acknowledgment that some homes exist most vividly in their absence.