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anastasia shpilko

YOU JUST MISSED HER

I was born in 1989 in Minsk. Three years after, from a Soviet provincial city it changed into the capital of sovereign Belarus and my family changed their citizenship by moving to Moscow. In 2016, I returned to my birthplace with a camera driven by the question: what would my life have been like if we had stayed? The slow pace of change in Belarus facilitated my imaginings. The setting for people's coming of age in Minsk today to a great extent resembles what I abandoned over two decades ago. Navigating between personal memories and contemporary realities, I tried to envision a female account of growing up in the city. Shuffling through infinite possible twists in a story of mine that never happened, I grasped fragments of the ones that I encountered in its place.

BEFORE THE FALL

In the last summer month of 2015, I photographed adolescents of the Latvian provincial town called Kuldiga and the neighbouring Pelci village in the west of the country. I tried to capture the anxiety of youth in a place with the complex past and uncertain future, to reveal the instant of transition from a child to an adult, and to reflect upon this special time which combines living in the moment and longing for a better tomorrow.

BETWEEN THE BLACK AND WHITE CLOUDS

What images come to mind when you hear democracy, or tyranny? Would they not be polar opposites? Lithuania and Belarus are now situated on opposing ends of the scale measuring the nature of political regimes in Europe. Still, their national histories had been crossing paths since the 13th century. In 2012, I went to two towns lying on either side of the Belarusian-Lithuanian border to show what hides at the junction of the European Union and ‘the last dictatorship in Europe’.

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© 2020 by Anastasia Shpilko

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