Your home is still there
by Florence Cuschieri
portfolio special mention call 'URBANAUTICA INSTITUTE AWARDS 2022', 2022
Category: Memories and Traditions
Through Mirja's story and her family archives, Your home is still there gives a photographic reading of Karelia and its territories devastated by the Winter War in 1939. Located at the border between Russia and Finland and annexed by the Soviet Union in 1944, they still bear the scars of this conflict. Place of life of Mirja and her family until 1944, I explore the notions of memory, habitat and exile.
I focused on Mirja's words, her bits of "forgotten stories" on this land where time seems to have stopped: a past that intertwines with the present, a childhood tormented by exile and war.
With Your home is still there, I hope to pay tribute to Mirja. In her, there was this unavoidable need to speak, to tell her story, and sometimes this silence in front of facts that even today touch her emotionally too closely. Words, photographs left as a legacy, a testimony crossing borders.