Maison avec une chaise (House with a chair), 2026

Asya Marakulina  

I began creating the ceramic series There Was a Home in Vienna. It was there that I started experimenting with ceramics, although the origins of this series date back to long before I moved to the city.

When I was living in Saint Petersburg, I often came across ruined nineteenth-century houses. I had always been fascinated by their remains. I photographed them with my phone, gradually building a kind of personal archive of these places.

After arriving in Vienna, I discovered a similar site near where I lived, where several houses had been demolished, probably because of their age. In the nineteenth century, houses were built adjoining one another. When one of them is demolished, the wall of the neighboring house often preserves the imprint of the one that has disappeared: wallpaper, ceramic tiles, and other traces of the inhabitants' lives reappear. This image, which had fascinated me for a long time, found its ideal expression in ceramics when I began working with the material.

In addition, I continue to collect photographs of demolished houses that I discover online. Unfortunately, the world is once again being devastated by wars. I think about it every day, hoping for the moment when they will finally come to an end, when people will stop dying, and when houses will no longer be destroyed. This reality has profoundly shaped the series.

I can say that each of my works always takes a real house as its starting point. However, throughout the creative process, I transform it profoundly. I alter some of the colors of the walls, sometimes adding graffiti or tags observed in the streets, as well as words gathered from the news. Some of the tags are photographed during my walks around the city. In this way, I create a collage that brings together houses that actually existed and fragments of my everyday urban surroundings.