I was flipping through the book “Ravens” by Masahisa Fukase, and at the end of the book, in a review, I came across the word “homelessness”. It surprised me because his photos reminded me of my doydu. There was a photo of a village in the book, some houses under snow, with lights on. When I look at this photo, I think about my grandma’s and grandpa’s house.

I think, what I liked in his photos before, was something that was called “homelessness’, there was indeed some detachment from the world in them. But now I increasingly notice his love and attention to all living beings and places that, as by chance, appeared in his lenses.

Probably, his “homelessness” is my “no man’s land” that belongs to “forest, spring, grass, trees and dew.”

Like many contemporary photographers, I never studied photography so I still feel insecure when I have to show someone my photos. Six years ago I went on a trip for my wife’s and my project “Lena River” about people living and working on the river. She literally explained to me how diaphragm works showing on curtains, a day before our departure.

At the moment of shooting I don’t think about people’s reaction. When I enter a forest, I ask spirits’ permission, then try to capture my feelings, talk to my inner “beast.” This is exactly what I write about in “Kyyl sangata.”

These texts, “Doydu” and “Kyyl sangata”, are my first literary attempts to write in Sakha, my native language. Sometimes I feel my inner “beast”. When I feel bad, it gets covered with scabs, so it is impossible to touch it. But I see that I am capable of self-healing. Possibly, “Kyyl sangata” is about this as well.

I wrote these poems for my people. The first poem from the short cycle “Kyyl sangata” is on the subject that we all need to wake up. The second one is a bit strange and self-ironic, I myself don’t understand it in full. The two last ones are about the language.

Because for quite a long time I didn’t remember how it was, to think and talk in the native language, and the photos helped me to return to that natural state. It was the language that I didn’t need to translate.

Photos connect me to my parents and older members of our large family. Especially with my father, who had a “Zenit” camera and a small movie camera.

In his young age, he developed his photos himself, and often made mistakes, so there was a lot of green, yellow and violet in them. Sometimes I intentionally colour my photos or make collages with stills from his films, to share my feelings. This reassembling of myself and surrounding spaces through the optics of my relatives is an important, though often painful process for me.

Sometimes, on rare occasions, this process can come as writing in other languages. Most probably just fragmentary: some pieces collected like patches. The message would be hidden between the lines.

My native language is embroidered in me, even though I have almost forgotten it and now remember and learn it anew. Embroidered and invisible, for a long time it helped me to learn Russian, later due to it I learned how to choose and intuitively embed the similarly sounding words into an open melodic text. Each time when I write, it is like I record the rhythm of my breathing and document my speech.

But the fact that I, eat last, have started writing in my own language doesn’t mean all my problems are over.

When I was writing “Doydu”, I was faced with the fact that my poems stopped sounding poetical. Written in Sakha, they became something ordinary, like diary notes or news that disappear in the feed every day. What is described in “Doydu” happens to us every day, and there is nothing new in these lines for my countrypeople. Besides when I wrote it, I didn’t feel a large distance from others which always appeared in texts in Russian and English. As if the same language told me that there were no strangers or others. Therefore my poems are not poems at all.

Also, when I just started writing in my native language, I realised that I continued to hide and remained silent about some things. As if, beside the inner need for silence, I have a need to restrain myself. For example, I don’t want to explain the details that can hurt my relatives. And I don’t want to unnecessarily explain anything. In the poem “Doydu” when I write that I imagine a road from Dirin to Khayakhsyt, I keep silent that there is a family cemetery there. I skip this fact.

Possibly, I copy what I see: thin black lines on a blue background. When night falls, the blue becomes darker. Our landscape is minimalistic during winter. I am inspired not just by my relatives, but by other artists, even in this text I refer to Masahisa Fukase, but personally I don’t like references. They were always a foreign language for me, a Western language. Often during reading, I stopped feeling anything, because I saw guidelines. At some point I realised they did not lead me to where I needed to be.

In the “I have been colonized” series of photos, I demonstrate two points of view: colonizer and colonized. This series was made in 2021, a year after publishing a collection of fragments “Assembly N 1. Ykhyakh,” and before I began “Doydu”, a photo-book where I tried to understand the processes happening in the Sakha Republic. Together, these works are a kind of attempt to get over the deep trauma of losing the native tongue.

The “Birds” project concerns the problem of sexualised child abuse. This project includes a series of multi-exposed photos, a poem and a short auto-fiction story about a difficult experience I and other girls from my family had to go through. All photos and the main text were made during my stay in Art Factory Malakta in Finland, during my participation in the Goethe-Institut program “The right to be cold” in 2021. Because I feel Ostrobothnia and its people are involved in the creation of the project, I would like to show it there. Possibly there will be an opportunity to do it in a small exhibition in Vaasa.

According to Sakha beliefs, we have three souls: Salgyn-kut – air-soul, a spiritual principle, Buor-kut – earth-soul, a physical body, and Iye-kut – mother-soul, which a person inherits from their ancestors. Interestingly, Salgyn-kut takes the form of a little person living in an ear that leaves a person’s body during sleep. In ancient times, Sakha people believed that our dreams are travels. The concept of our air soul living inside an ear seems to me a wonderful metaphor. It is very important to know how to hear others.

When I was a child, my mother gathered snags and stumps that looked like birds and animals. She had an engineer’s education but for me she and other women of my family were real artists. They taught me to see the world hidden behind the patterns. The patterns were drawn with threads by my ebe.

When I was in Year three, ebe gave me Unts, a white deer’s fur winter boots. On my bile, there were boys and girls dancing in national costumes embroidered with golden thread on black cloth. It was embroidered with irregular stitches, in a very simple manner, but I understood everything anyway. They danced ohyohay around my feet.

When I grew up, I stopped seeing and feeling this world and grieved hard over its loss. At the same time, in our culture it is not customary to complain about life, and generally any strong emotions and sudden movements are undesirable. One cannot be very happy. Between us, we joke that we are ton dyon, frozen people.

Most likely, this resource-saving regime was needed for our ancestors to survive in the conditions of extremely cold temperatures. We have a very long and cold winter, it starts in October and ends in April-May. In December and January, it is freezing minus 50 Celsius degrees. It is the silence of nature, the cold and time deficit that technology and the body simply cannot stand. I try to show this tension in my works. I try to find it in what I see. This is my way of saying something.

Urbanisation, aggressive mining, industrial logging, and laws that violate the rights of the indigenous peoples, as well as military mobilization, all together they disrupt the natural cycle of life in the Republic. Caused by the climatic changes, large wildfires and floods happen annually. During winters, due to the cold, people rarely go outside. Because of the smog, the sun is often out of sight. Smoke from the fires poisons the air.

Despite the widespread Orthodox religion, we managed to preserve, albeit partially, our beliefs in Aiyy. Being sun worshipers, we believe that there are invisible solar reins behind our backs. We always wait for the winter to end, and celebrate New Year during summer, on the Summer Solstice. This festival is called Ykhyakh, we hold it in the plain air, watching strongman competitions, horse races, and drinking kumyss.

Perhaps, the same Arctic nature and traditions teach us to transform the complex energy caused by difficult conditions into creation and inner peace.

For example, my son-in-law dries the deer kamuse, from which Unts are made. He tightens and straightens the skin taken from the feet of a deer, on a special device for drying. He likes to do this alone. This is a time when he can stay alone with his thoughts.

In fact, I do the same when I go out to the countryside with my camera. I am from the central, behind the river Churap district. We have Alaases everywhere – this is a landscape formed by the thawing of the underground ice. Alaas is an oval shape, there is a lake in the middle and a forest around it. Before Soviet time, the Sakha people lived in the Alaases. Each family had its own Alaas. My aunt Varya was born in an Alaas, and my mother was already born in a village.

My relatives survived the Churap forced deportation to the North. My ebe Tatyyaas was practically a child when she got to the Kobyaisky ulus. Out of the three uluses, where the deportees were sent, that one suffered the greatest famine.

My other ebe was deported to the Zhigan district. Before departure, she managed to save her own ebe from a certain death. They hid from soldiers and made their way to a river barge which sailed to Yakutsk. There a kind woman hid them, saying they were travelling with her. When they came to relatives, she left her ebe with them, and united with her later, after returning from the deportation.

Even though I have never talked to them about it, I think I have learned a lot from them. The word “resistance” is hardly appropriate here, but each of us is looking for our own ways to find the lost silence.