April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

(The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot) 


In the photo series Running To The Edge, by Julia Borissova, old photos of Russian emigrants are partly covered with flowers and petals. With this simple gesture she created new images. The petals follow mostly the shape of the figure in the picture, but sometimes the intervention is more related to the photo as an object.

The newly constructed images are filled with melancholy and after a while looking at them you start wondering, “Who are these people, what were their names … what has happened to them?”

Flowers are strong vanitas symbols, and we can assume that the persons in the photos have deceased. In one of her photos Julia Borissova even covered the heads of two figures with a red cross of petals, as if she wants to say, “their life is over”. But then suddenly there is this lovely fairylike girl lying in the grass, sleeping under a red blanket … or is it the dress she is wearing? Or this lady covered with flowers as if she carries a huge bouquet … so full of life, so full of death!

In another photo -a family portrait- is a horizontal crease that looks a bit like a crack. Borissova repaired the crack with cross stabbing almost like embroidery … did she want heal the past, does she want to keep its memory alive?

Playing with flowers, petals and leaves could be considered as childlike innocent and lovely … but in this photo series there also is a shady side, a sad side … flowers fade.

Somehow the images of Running To The Edge remind me of moments when I visited the graves of friends. Walking in the cemetery, past all those tombstones with their withered flowers … endless rows of unknown people … who were they, what did they do in life, are they still being remembered?

Right now, at the moment I write these lines, my mother is very ill and I know she will die soon. Who will remember her and for how long?

Is this not why we make art … to be remembered? I would not say it is the only reason of course, but in an existential sense, don’t we often make pictures to remember and to be remembered?

Luuk Wilmering, November 2012

Running To The Edge

© Copyright Julia Borissova