Charred wires

These works are part of an ongoing project. Its title refers to events from my grandfather's life. In 1954, while working as an electrician, he witnessed a fatal accident at a transformer substation. His colleague was electrocuted and burned to death. My grandfather was detained and subjected to physical duress at the militia to compel testimony. The resulting head trauma, compounded by an existing concussion and severe combat wounds, triggered a mental illness. He was institutionalized in a psychiatric hospital. From then on, his life unfolded between the hospital and his parents' village house, severed from his accustomed family environment.

I only learned of my grandfather's fate as an adult. He was an uncomfortable, hidden chapter of our family history. To this day, his diagnosis remains unspoken, glossed over with the euphemism of "quiet insanity".

In this project, I continue to reflect on male loneliness and personal trauma, expanding the context to explore how forgetting can become a way to reassemble the past. This project goes beyond my grandfather's personal story. It explores the gap between a person and their memory. It resonates with anyone who has experienced family silence, the inability to directly name illness, loss, or violence, and the way inconvenient biographies gradually disappear from the narrative.

I use photographs, archival materials, and an intuitive approach to connect the past with what remains in memory: fact and euphemism, the family album and its missing pages, a person and an image that has been repressed and replaced by silence. By filling in the gaps in my grandfather's missing "family album, " I do not seek to restore the past as it was. Rather, I attempt to create a new space of memory.

This project explores how memory is formed through omissions and repression. And about how an artistic gesture can become a way to restore visibility to a person whose life has been reduced to family default.