This series was shot at the Izmailovo flea market—a place where objects go after they cease to belong to anyone. Among them are toys that were once part of someone’s daily life, their habits, their attachments. Here, they lie alongside other items, stripped of the distinctions that once made them significant.
I am interested in the state where an object continues to exist physically, but its connection to a person has been lost. Toys here are not perceived as lost in the conventional sense—they are not sought out nor do they vanish suddenly; rather, they exit the life in which they held significance. In the market, this becomes visible as a process: the personal gradually transforms into the collective, and then—into the neutral.
During the shoot, I constantly returned to thoughts of my toys. More accurately, I focused on the feeling that they once were a part of me and my experiences, and then they ceased to be. Sometimes, looking at these toys, I would begin to recognize myself in them—the porcelain dolls with that delicate elegance I once admired, or the rocking horse in which the image of my favorite childhood toy suddenly emerged.
This project attempts to capture that state existing between: belonging and its absence, between memory and its loss. Maturation here manifests not as forward momentum, but as a gradual letting go. And it becomes clear in this process: childhood ends the moment something that once was part of you continues to exist without you—and you can no longer reclaim that connection.
