'How to eat at night' investigates how ideological regimes replace inherited traditions with engineered collective memory. In societies shaped by centralised power and long histories of political myth-making — from the former USSR to modern-day China — fairy tales are not inherited, but engineered. These are not stories passed down, but illusions constructed to soothe, distract, and control. On the surface, they appear vivid, even beautiful — but with the lightest touch, their seams begin to loosen. My ancestors came from Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia — a lineage stretched across borders that shifted faster than the stories meant to fix them. Under the Soviet regime, these layered identities were collapsed into a single, state-approved narrative. I grew up inside that version of the world — comforted by its simplicity, yet always aware of the quiet spaces where something was missing. But the story didn’t end. 'The tale' continues. Its language is smoother now, its symbols updated, but the rhythm remains unchanged. When I return to my motherland, the atmosphere feels gently distorted: streets slightly misaligned, meanings subtly rearranged. It’s as if the country lives inside a dream still being told — a dream that resists waking. The visual language deliberately blurs the boundary between documentation and construction. Straight documentary photographs coexist with manipulated images and dense collages, layering fragments until the viewer is uncertain where one source ends and another begins. Some of the most uncanny images are not altered at all — their strangeness emerging purely from observation, echoing how propaganda distorts reality not by invention, but by slight shifts of the familiar. This multimedia series, which also incorporates video and sound, reflects on the fragile boundary between memory and invention, between personal history and prescribed tradition. Drawing on the atmosphere of Andersen’s fairy tales — where beauty coexists with unease — the work reveals how memory itself becomes unstable when tradition is no longer inherited, but designed.