Repairing Memories:
Embroidering the Family Archive

Meeting with artist-researcher, teacher and graduate of the Postgraduate School of Art and Design of the Higher School of Economics Marina Sazonenko. Marina is a specialist in documentary embroidery. She will invite participants of her master class to first tell a story about their family, and then capture the memory in embroidery. Working on creating an archive helps to see unobvious connections and immerse yourself in the history of the family, discovering the origins of your own identity in it. "Repairing Memories" is an opportunity to tell about yourself through creativity and preserve the result of your reflections in a material object. "The history of my family was formed around the history of fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers, and in this situation, women's stories and traditions that are passed down from mother to daughter or from grandmother to granddaughter remained in the shadows," says the artist. "I wanted to fill these gaps, and I began working on embroidery from a photograph, turning mostly to female images. I didn't have the opportunity to leaf through the family photo archive, so I came up with the idea of ​​creating it myself. I left the faces on the embroideries without features, thus giving the viewer the opportunity to look at the archive more broadly and associate the characters with their ancestors."