Elena Batova

"Everyone looking at the sea is an Odyssey who does not want to go back home!"

(Anez Warda, Ulysses)

It is impossible to predict what will be the impetus to the project. So "Odyssey" began with the purchase of an old album with photographs about the journey from St. Petersburg to Stockholm in 1912. Cards preserved the memory of events and people who were useless to no one. They reminded me of the family archives, which remained after the death of Maternal grandfather. Looking through the photos, I realized that some of them are just as “dumb” for me as the pictures from the purchased album. I had the idea to mix images from different archives, old and modern photos and write a story about the journey that will connect the past and the present. So, through the lost memory of a foreign family, I tried to reconstruct my history.

I called the project “Odyssey” on the estate of one of the most famous heroes of Homer, since the travels of Ulysses for me have always been a metaphor for searching and finding my memory and as a result of my own home.