Shape of water, 2020

Olga Rakova  

For me, memory is the substrate of identity. I draw on my experience as an archaeologist when working with personal archives and with fragments that carry other people's stories: old photographs, vintage printed images, broken jewellery, drying cases. Collage becomes both a central method and a mode of research through which I seek to reveal identity as unstable and multiple.

Working with fragments is my way of making sense of the whole: memory, femininity, body image, and Home, understood as a structure continually reassembled, where traces of personal and cultural artefacts form temporary connections. Within these shifting constellations, I create fields of interaction between what is disintegrating and what is being retained. Heterogeneous elements gather into a shaky, tense wholeness.

In my practice, I attend to how physical, mental, and digital spaces coexist within a phygital reality. As I explore the mechanisms of memory and personal remembrance, I often move objects that are decaying, or already lost, in the material world from the terrain of “fading" memory, a space in which recollection is irreversibly rewritten, into XR. From there, these objects can return from the digital realm and re-enter the material world as artworks. My work becomes a way of registering destruction and loss, while also opening the possibility of rebuilding forms of presence in which identity is understood as a dynamic unity.

______

Autobiographical memory underpins identity. I work with personal archives and fragments of others' histories, including old photographs, vintage prints, and broken jewellery, using collage as both a creative method and a mode of research to explore the fluidity and multiplicity of identity. Through fragments, I move towards a wider whole: memory, femininity, the body, and the notion of home as a set of structures continually being remade.

My practice considers the interplay between decay and persistence across physical, mental, and digital spaces. Objects that are lost or eroded in the material world are translated into XR environments, where they can be rematerialised as artworks. In this process, I register loss while tracing how identity may be reconstructed as a dynamic, evolving unity.