Where
2024
Cabinet filled with water from the Volga River, found objects, wooden planks, logs, aquarium, Volga water, digital print
After spending time in Nizhny Novgorod and visiting Chkalovsk, Dzerzhinsk, Gorodets, and Gorbatov, I noticed how deeply each city in this region is connected to water. People have always settled along the Volga — drinking from it, fishing, building their lives around it for centuries. Yet nothing remains of the ancient settlements, nor even of houses a hundred years old: the same water that sustained them also flooded them.
In Dzerzhinsk, the river changed its course and began to submerge the nearby settlements, forcing residents to move three times.
When the Nizhny Novgorod Hydroelectric Station was built, many houses were flooded. Though residents were offered relocation to higher ground, some resisted — some houses were abandoned, some went underwater together with their owners’ memories.
Now, somewhere at the bottom of the Volga, lie these submerged homes.
I decided to create the space of a house underwater. The viewer enters by walking over wooden planks and logs and finds an instruction sheet at the entrance — on its reverse side, a small mark shows the place where the drowned houses are located.
Following the instruction, the viewer explores the space in silence for 15 minutes: objects and texts on a table suggest fragments of a story — about the construction of the hydroelectric dam, about a worker who lived in Chkalovsk, about what was lost. Moving deeper inside, one eventually encounters a cabinet. From a distance, it looks ordinary, but peering inside reveals that it is slowly filling with water. Inside are water from the Volga, stones from the Chkalovsk shore, a few photographs, bottle caps, and shells.
It becomes clear that this cabinet is the sunken home.
In Dzerzhinsk, the river changed its course and began to submerge the nearby settlements, forcing residents to move three times.
When the Nizhny Novgorod Hydroelectric Station was built, many houses were flooded. Though residents were offered relocation to higher ground, some resisted — some houses were abandoned, some went underwater together with their owners’ memories.
Now, somewhere at the bottom of the Volga, lie these submerged homes.
I decided to create the space of a house underwater. The viewer enters by walking over wooden planks and logs and finds an instruction sheet at the entrance — on its reverse side, a small mark shows the place where the drowned houses are located.
Following the instruction, the viewer explores the space in silence for 15 minutes: objects and texts on a table suggest fragments of a story — about the construction of the hydroelectric dam, about a worker who lived in Chkalovsk, about what was lost. Moving deeper inside, one eventually encounters a cabinet. From a distance, it looks ordinary, but peering inside reveals that it is slowly filling with water. Inside are water from the Volga, stones from the Chkalovsk shore, a few photographs, bottle caps, and shells.
It becomes clear that this cabinet is the sunken home.