The Three of Us

This mockumentary project draws on a lesser-known 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 humanity — liberated from illness, aging, and mortality. Scientific texts seriously speculated about resurrecting the dead and engineering eternal life, and there is evidence that the preservation of Vladimir Lenin’s body was fuelled by these ambitions.

At the fictional core of the project, a secret Soviet program was launched to extend life and prepare for Lenin’s resurrection. The program did not succeed in bringing him back; instead, three cloned girls were produced — unfit for propaganda, carrying no symbolic value, and invisible to the system that created them. When the USSR collapsed, the program was abandoned, and the girls were left in a world they were never meant to inherit.

Rooted in the biography of the artist — born in the USSR, shaped by its collapse, and repeatedly redefined through migration — the project explores fractured identities, dislocation, and the impossibility of belonging. The clones function as both fictional characters and metaphors, revealing the afterlife of ideologies: the ways collapsed systems continue to deform individual lives and the world at large long after their apparent end.