I don’t know what homesickness means. The only way how this feeling shows itself is via the nostalgia. It is like the feeling of love that shows itself at its most when the object of love is far away or unreachable.

Every time I return to my hometown, I try to create a project about it, but it inevitably fails. This happens because I can’t distance myself from the personal pain I’ve experienced there. It’s impossible to mend the broken relationships with my family or to restore the places of my childhood that are now gone. My home and school literally sank into the ground due to an ecological disaster. I left the city the day before the train station was shut down because of the growing number of sinkholes caused by mining.

To reconnect with my lost childhood, I spend time with teenagers, photographing them and documenting their stories. Since I left, the Internet has made teenagers in Berezniki almost indistinguishable from their peers in the capital. Yet, many still face domestic violence from alcoholic parents and struggle with uncertainty about their dreams of leaving. None of that has changed, and it all resonates with me so deeply, as if I were fourteen again.

The project consists of film photographs taken in Berezniki in 2019, an archive of my childhood journals about nature, and old prints of photographs from the neighborhood where I grew up, which was abandoned after an ecological disaster.