The Three of Us

This mockumentary project grows out of a real and often overlooked facet of Soviet history: the belief that death could be conquered. After the 1917 Revolution, some Bolsheviks dreamed not only of a new society, but of a new human — one liberated from aging, illness, and mortality. Scientific texts speculated seriously about resurrecting the dead and engineering eternal life.

That dream did not die with the USSR. Today, it survives in altered forms — in cryogenic startups and unusual alliances of Orthodox believers, transhumanist scientists, and resourceful entrepreneurs who see death as a technical problem to solve. This project imagines a world where one Soviet immortality experiment succeeds. Its result, however, is not a reborn Lenin, but three cloned girls — disoriented, unclaimed, and unsure of their place in a world they were never meant to inherit.

The work is grounded in the artist’s biography: born in the USSR, shaped by its collapse, and repeatedly redefined through migration. With each new country, a new version of the self emerged — split, translated, and partially lost. The three clones become metaphors for this fractured identity: for the impossibility of being whole, the instability of belonging, and the lingering presence of systems that never fully let go.