In 2012, I travelled to my grandmother Antoņina's native village of Pilcene in Latvia's eastern region of Latgale. I was searching for the place I had imagined for years while looking through photographs from her youth - a landscape that existed somewhere between memory, family history, and imagination.
For the most part, our lives are no longer connected to a single place—a piece of land or the house our grandparents built. The ease of travelling across the world, changing places of residence, and moving between physical and virtual spaces has made our identities both more fluid and more interconnected. Meeting the people of Pilcene gave me a strange feeling. Although they were strangers, I recognised something deeply familiar yet almost forgotten—the women in my own family. Especially when Anna quietly asked me to listen to the bees singing in the evening, or told seemingly endless stories about her past. Walking through Pilcene and the surrounding villages, I returned to my own childhood and to my mother's, where every person has their own scent and fresh milk is always tasted while still warm.
Through this work, I explore photography as a way of reconnecting with places and histories that seem to be disappearing. I follow the fragile traces that remain in lived memory. By seeking out the people who once knew my grandmother, I encountered a community whose recollections preserve fragments of a world that is gradually fading away.
CO Berlin, 2017