I worked on Waving Goodbye since July 2021, after I spent two months with my mom in the Catskills while she lived as a caregiver to an elderly man with rapidly declining dementia. That summer my mom also bought her first apartment after 20 years of living in USA. By this point, I’d been living in Spain for 3 years and didn’t see her often. It was an emotionally volatile summer. I watched her become increasingly overwhelmed by her client’s deteriorating state, while the nature around us seemed to stand still in its beauty. I realized I had the freedom to explore it while my mom was tied to caring for this man almost 24/7 and this created a tension in our already strained relationship. Her overwhelm also triggered memories of our turbulent move to the US when I was 9. In July 2023, I visited my grandma in Russia, who I grew up with until we moved. The dynamic between us was completely different. She let me take pictures of her and our co-habitation was peaceful.This project is a collection of paradoxical feelings, my own memories mixed with my mom’s to untangle our voices in my head. It's an intent to understand my place in the world since moving to the US with her and then moving to Spain alone, where geographically I’m almost exactly in-between my grandma in Russia and my mom in the USA.To complete this project I will re-sequence the book dummy I’ve made with 15 new photos I will make in the Arteles residency, producing an exhibition, writing a text, and publishing the book.
