comics

You: Why shame?
Me: I am from Russia, and it's all messed up.
You: Ye, okay, but it can't all be bad, right?
Me: I didn't really get a chance to love the good parts
You: So you left too early?
Me: No, it's not that
You: Sorry, I'm just trying to understand
Me: No worries, I'll try to explain

Me: Long time ago somebody said that my country has two problems, "fools and bad roads". They weren't wrong, the roads suck, every summer they try to fix the potholes by adding some of the cheapest shit to it, while the budget states that big money was spent..
You: What do you mean by big numbers spent? Didn't you just say they use the cheap stuff.
Me: Yes, you see it's one one their favorite tricks to steal money. You write down that it went on the road works while, in fact, it safely travels to your overseas bank account

You: Do they all have an overseas bank accounts?
Me: Why do you think they had to question me for 2 hours at Rabobank while opening my account.
You: fuuck, that's really annoying
Me: Indeed, now where was I?

You: Roads and ..?
Me: Oh, yeah, fools. Stubborn fools, that eat the information Первый Канал is feeding them
You: What is pervyi kanal?
Me: Biggest broadcasting channel for governmental propaganda.
You: Kinda like Wakker Nederland?
Me: Yeah, something like that.
You: So if the fools are the majority then that's why Puting always gets voted for?
Me: Not quite, you see it gets interesting here.

Me: The majority of fools majorly doesn't vote at all, but it doesn't prevent United Russia (the political party) from getting their votes.
You: But how?
Me: Every once in awhile a nice fellow with a stack of votes with pass by and shove all of them in the box.
You: But that's against the law, does nobody stop him?
Me: *cough*
Me: Sorry, there are now volunteers who are seeing that that doesn't happen, however, it still doesn't affect the vote results much.
You: But.. how?
Me: In the end they can select whatever party, name or person, regardless of the vote.
You: Oh, man, that's really fucked.
Me: ...

Me: So you see, I am struggling to find something to love then all I am used to seeing in abuse of power and violence.
You: There's violence too?
Me: Of course, old fashioned brute force at any peaceful protest, people taken without any explanation, gone missing and put into prison unjustly. Victims of rape and assault being prosecuted instead of their attacker. I can go on?

You: I think I need to sit down.
Me: Me too, would you like some tea?
You: Yes, please.
You: I'm very sorry
Me: Me too, I feel most sorry for everyone who loves Russia and wants to live there. My heart really aches for them. Everybody deserves to live in safety and love their country and to help make it better, make sure it goes hand in hand with time. I wish it was something to be done for my country, but I think it will take a few lifetimes to achieve that. You can call me selfish, but I d rather leave and try for a better life somewhere else.
You: I don't think you are selfish, I think it is brave, do you want a hug?

We hug.

When I think of alienation, the first thing that comes to mind is me being an alien, an immigrant. I don’t belong to the place I inhabit and I don’t belong to the place that produced me.

As long as I remember I never fully felt at home. For the longest time I thought that the reason was the place. It simply was a wrong place and I felt obligated and hungry to keep moving and keep looking for that one place that is going to feel right, that one place I can stop and relax.

Working on this project made me wonder if there is perhaps a different reason for my experience. Maybe something else makes every place feel like a cold cave. Maybe it all traces back to shame?

It seems impossible to connect with any place when there is no place that I can trace back to, when everything that was there is denied and erased by shame. I never understood how bad the situation was, how deeply ashamed I was and how strongly it affected my well being. This project made me realise an identity crisis I've been living with and I intend to use the time I have to figure out how I can heal.

My history determines the reason I do things the way I do. I struggle with depression and anxiety and that often makes me feel very sad and loud on the inside. As a result, I started making things that would have an opposite effect on anyone looking at it. My style, motives and colours are all working to calm and soothe. I want to make you feel better as much as I want to make myself feel better. I stay faithful to my approach, only, this time I have to translate something unpleasant, something intrusive and violent. I want to find out what components would help me make my story true and unsettling, what would help me make this story seen.

Apart from traditional media I’ve started using sound and video, and I expect to find these tools quite useful for my idea. I want to see how fictional narrative through audiovisual media can be used to translate feelings of shame and alienation caused by difficult heritage to overcode its meaning.

Fictional narrative, because I see great value in reordering facts into stories, that way I can keep a piece of mystery for myself in this topic I know far too well.

Audiovisual media, because there are ways sound and image can affect us and set the right tone, like nothing else.

Shame and alienation in relation to difficult heritage is the main focus of my project, as it's something I want to decode.

To me, a difficult heritage means experiencing negative effects of one’s background.

Overcode its meaning is a sense of finding new points of contact and making peace with them.

Trust the process, it will get you where you need to be. I am very bad at research, I don’t know where to begin, I don’t know where to end. That is why I always start by making plans, notes, sketches, messes. I started collecting everything I could think of on a website, my feelings, thoughts and observations. I wrote the fourth chapter of this story and began working on an animation.

At that time I still wanted to solve this, I wanted to find an answer, quite naive of me. The impossibly high goal didn’t give me a moment to breathe, until I turned to my family for help. My sister, to be precise, always knows how to push me when I am stuck. She said go smaller, don’t try to show everything, just the most important things, the feeling of it, the experience you hold. She mentioned russian motives popping up here and there and voila I had the beginning for my idea, thanks to my sweet sister. She holds an ability to see things I can't see once I dig too deep into my own worries and thoughts. I am forever thankful for the inspiration that she is.

My mother was the next person I turned to, I wanted to make the animation bittersweet, give it something warm and homelike. Gathering my thoughts, I wrote a short text, it had weight but wasn’t too sad. However, once my mom read it, the text became much heavier, much more hopeless. When I was a kid my mom would sing me lullabies, they were always war songs, those were the only ones she knew. She would cry sometimes as she sang them, I remember she could always make something sound sad. I asked her to do the voice over because she's my mom and in a way the origin of me and my voice, revisiting a memory and past is often about going back to the beginning, seeing its former shape. In the end her voice and the music I wrote went smoothly with the naive, simple style of animation, allowing it to not feel overwhelmingly sad or dark.

The animation revolves around three main symbols, birch tree, church domes and women wearing kokoshnik.

The birch tree has become an unspoken symbol of russia, it is constantly reappearing in poetry, paintings and songs by russian artists. There is a great level of nostalgia and romance surrounding this tree, it’s about nature, loneliness and beauty of everyday things. I’ve used this symbol to show a part of me that longs to connect with my roots.

Church domes represent the hypocrisy in russian society, hypocrisy surrounding faith and devotion and what it means to be a good person. The priests working in churches are just as criminally involved as the people in the government, the faith is founded on theft and blood. And still there is this sense of pride about how devout the people are and how mighty our values are. Nobody cares that churches don’t mean a thing and are being built on any random empty spot just to keep up with the status quo.

Kokoshnik is a part of a traditional russian costume. Historically the headpiece was worn by married women, to hide their hair and cover the head. It was used to show your status and the place in society. To me it all traces to the traditional gender roles and the role of women to be a mother and the keeper of the home. The word kokoshnik comes from a word that translates to ‘laying hen’, and that is exactly what women were seen as. As often the time brings change, but the main idea stays the same for the women in modern Russia. There is a lot of pressure to have a big family and be a housewife, women’s wishes and autonomy are secondary.

In the animation I tried to trace a feeling of being faced and reminded of negative fragments from a place I call home. I wanted to show how this shame becomes part of my routine, how it takes shape. Things that take place in our mind have an ability to constitute themselves in reality, as anxiety, panic or ghosts. The deeper you fall in the more these shapes and silhouettes overtake your space, leaving you there to adjust. When confronted with the past you might try “to push it out of the orbit’ (Solaris, 1971). But the figures are the product of your own mind, and they will return, as long as you don’t let your mind rest.

Animation is a good medium because there is time for the audience to let the sounds and images sink in, transfer their meaning, but I had to find a different way of translating that into a printed publication. When all you have is a spread the work needs to work faster. I created an illustration, whose purpose was to be the extension of the film and further translate the feeling.

I decided to make a layered illustration, using red film to highlight one layer and dim the other. One layer is blue and peaceful, it depicts me and fragments of my home, it’s a bit empty, but peaceful. Second layer is red, it is busy, crowded and filled with different scenes and symbols similar to the animation. But for this illus- tration to work the images needed to become uncomfortable and intrusive, they needed to be something you’d wanna silence but laying the red filter over it.

When the red film is over the image the red doesn’t completely disappear, it remains as a ghostly silhouette. The ghostly figures identify a moment where the past interrupts and inserts itself in the present, oftenly with an uneasy effect. The appearance of a ghost in the present signals the return of a repressed or forgotten past. (Z. Dziuban, 2014)

This method resembles the dynamic between me and these intrusive thoughts, the way they appear and overwhelm the space with their presence. The silhouettes left under the red film speak to how ignoring something and trying to mute it doesn’t make it go away, only delays and dims it.

There are certain difficulties then working with a sensitive personal topic, all throughout this project I’ve had hard time digging into it and bring it out in some shape and form. It’s been a journey and it’s probably going to continue for a while longer. As a result of this project I’ve gained a better understanding with myself and other people, in relation to dealing with difficult heritage. Using fiction and reality, sound and image I’ve translated my feelings and anxiety into something tangible, something that I can work with further.

Overall, the process has been quite therapeutic and finishing this chapter I am excited to start another. I would like to keep working around this in a slightly different key. I’ve made work about how disturbing or annoying this can feel and now I want to make something good, I want to explore the bridge between comfort and confrontation and get busy world making, or remaking. Wait and see, you’ll hear of me again.

Keenan, T., 2004. Mobilizing Shame. South Atlantic Quarterly, pp.435 - 438.

“Shame is thought of as a primordial force that articulates or links knowledge with action, a feeling or a sensation brought on not by physical contact but by knowl-edge or consciousness alone.”

Reeves, K. and Logan, W., 2008. Places of Pain and Shame : Dealing with ‘Difficult Heritage’. London, UNITED KINGDOM: Routledge.

Ahmed, S., 2010. The Promise of Happiness.

> Trevor PhIllIps suggests that the problem with multiculturalism is that it makes people unhappy. Or we could say that he turns multiculturalism into a problem by attributing it as the cause of unhappiness: as if when we are “in” multiculturalism, we are “out” of our comfort zone. “Integration is not a dream: it is a matter of survival.”
> While conservative western societies see multiculturalism as an uncomfortable occurrence, I am interested in the embodied experience of growing up in a multi- cultural environment. While the benefits, from my perspective and truly great and can’t be gained differently, it’s interesting to explore the difficulties and personal downsides of being multicultural.

Solaris. 1971. [film] Directed by A. Tarkovsky. USSR.

The ocean is able to manifest the ghosts from people’s minds. The way charac- ters interact or try to rid themselves of the past is very interesting, the reaction to send it out to space or to accept and love it. The only thing that is clear, is that you can’t rid yourself of these visitors, because you are the origin of them, you and your mind.

2019. The Politics of Shame: Ai Weiwei in conversation with Anthony Downey.

Government using shame as a tool of power and control over the population.

Kabalek, K., 2014. Memory and Periphery. Israel. pp.116 - 120.

Haunting Memory. “The figure of the ghost designates the moment of the past’s sudden and uncanny interruption or disruption of the present, which is often ex- perienced as threatening. The disfiguration of the present brought by the ghost’s appearance signals the return of the forgotten or repressed past”

Nowness, 2021. Cheeto Monster Asami Tsukada. [image] Available at: https:// www.nowness.com/topic/visual-narrative/cheeto-monster-david-ehrenreich-cas- sandra-surina [Accessed 10 November 2021].

I like to hear stories of other expats and see how they are adjusting to different places. This video in particular called out to me Asami finds all these practices and bits that comfort her in the new place. I can relate to that a lot. Asami says that it was difficult to find Japanese music that empowered her like punk music.

Campagna, F., 2021. The End of The World(s).

Can ‘world making’ be used on a smaller scale? When I look back at something from the past with my “new” eyes, from my new position and reimagine it, make it mean something else or to be a positive experience, a positive memory, am I ‘world making’? It’s in the interest of my future to remodel the past. I don’t hold any responsibility for the past, or the beginning of this “my” world.