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, in fringe alliances between Orthodox believers, scientists, and resourceful entrepreneurs who see death as a technical flaw to be fixed. This project imagines a world in which one Soviet immortality experiment quietly succeeds. But its result is not a reborn Lenin, as intended, but three cloned girls — disoriented, unclaimed, and uncertain of their purpose in the world they were never meant to inherit.

The work draws on the artist’s own biography: born in the USSR, coming of age during its collapse, shaped by migration and reinvention. The three clones become a metaphor for fractured identity: for being split across ideologies and geographies, never fully whole. They carry the unfinished legacy of a system that tried to cheat death — and never quite let go of the living.