REMINISCENCES OF CHILDHOOD (Belarus, 1989)

From her birth to 1960, the year in which she turned seven and her parents divorced, Galina Moskaleva’s father photographed the family. In 1988 her father gave the negatives to her as a present. Moskaleva thought of the photographs more as a psychological investigation than as a collection of snapshots. With the aid of the negatives she began a reconstruction of her earlier life. For her, it was not remembering that was central to this process, but rewriting. Communism constructed a past that the contemporary Russian would rather forget. Moskaleva, on the contrary, wants to bring this past to life. To that end she literally revises the images of her childhood by colouring them in and duplicating them. The duplication points to how ‘memory is never static, but always in movement’.