We are navigating a historic moment of global re-mapping, yet this has happened before—places that seemed “stable and forever” were suddenly no more.
While re-visiting the apartment of her childhood, spent in Soviet Belarus, Los Angeles-based artist and our (no) borders open call finalist Yelena Zhelezov talks to people who experienced a border change, either in name or territory. What is it like to live in the shadow of a disappeared country, a missing definition? What happens to the sense of place and belonging? Are there déjà vus? What remains?
The first guest to the Born in Ghostland podcast is Anna Zoria, an artist who was born in Russia just before the dissolution of the USSR, grew up in Canada, and lived in France. Anna and Yelena discuss the interstitial feelings of inhabiting several countries at once, music and poetry as time-space-travel devices, grandparents and ideology, Soviet furniture and fashion fetishization, comfort food, and being lost in translation.
