moom bookshop

The project started with a box of negatives I found at my parents’ house a few years ago. There were about 200 processed and unprocessed films, shot by my father. I excavated their contents, delving deeper into the lost images of my father’s life, to create my own stories by using these photographs he took before his marriage to my mother and my birth. I let myself enter into the world of a young man I never knew, and find connections in what possibly cannot be connected with the help of Italo Calvino’s words from his novel ‘If on a winter’s night a traveller’. With this work, I continue my artistic exploration of questions about found images and archives, and how a coincidence can lead to a new narrative that does not relate perhaps to the real events in these photographs. It is my way to build up ‘a possible portal between an unfinished past and a reopened future’, described by Hal Foster (Foster, H. 2004. An Archival Impulse. In: October 110, Fall 2004, p.15).

It has started as a dummy book with title ‘Reading Apocrypha’. The dummy was shortlisted for FOAM Dummy Award (2016), TOP 10 of Self-Publish Riga (2016) and ‘Rock Your Dummy’ at Le PhotoBookFest in Paris (2015). In June 2018 the book was published under a new title ‘You can call him another man’. Here you can see various installation shots: at every new place I create a new story, a new narrative, which exists only once.