© Nadia Rodionova from "Moon Cat"

Nadia Rodionova’s Moon Cat unfolds as a quiet yet disquieting inquiry into memory, authorship, and the fragile ethics of looking. Emerging from the artist’s intimate account of her father’s apartment, an environment layered with childhood objects, tools, wires, and accumulated residue, the project constructs a space where personal history is not simply recalled but actively reassembled, scanned, and re-photographed into unstable forms of preservation. What begins as an attempt to safeguard childhood memory gradually becomes a more complex meditation on intrusion, desire, and the impossible neutrality of the image.

© Nadia Rodionova from "Moon Cat"

At the core of the project is a tension that is both familial and epistemological. The father’s apartment is simultaneously home and territory, archive and disorder, memory container and site of refusal. Rodionova’s decision to document it, secretly, and with a sense of transgression, places the viewer in an ethically ambiguous position. The act of photographing and 3D scanning is not neutral preservation; it is a form of extraction. Yet it is also an act of survival. The artist’s need to stabilize memory clashes with the father’s desire for erasure, producing a fragile line between care and violation.

© Nadia Rodionova from "Moon Cat"

© Nadia Rodionova from "Moon Cat"

© Nadia Rodionova from "Moon Cat"

This is where memory emerges as something more than recollection. It becomes a navigational structure, a hidden map that allows the self to orient itself in time. One might say that memory of home and family operates as a foundational identity card, constantly revised yet persistently structuring how we understand where we come from and, consequently, where we might be going. Without this invisible cartography, disorientation becomes not only possible but inevitable. Rodionova’s project captures precisely this instability: the fear that memory, if not actively held or reconstructed, will dissolve into the clutter of material reality.

© Nadia Rodionova from "Moon Cat"

The use of image-making technologies intensifies this process. Photography and 3D scanning do not merely document; they generate what can be called “mirror images”—not reflections of reality, but compensatory constructions produced when reality itself feels insufficient or unreadable. These mirror images force a heightened attention, an almost forensic mode of seeing that pushes beyond surface recognition. In this sense, the project suggests that contemporary image-making is less about representation than transformation: a sublimation of the visible into something more legible, more emotionally processable. Reality is not simply captured; it is metabolized.

This metaphor of digestion becomes central. The work does not remain at the level of representation but enters what could be described as a metabolic function of creativity. Memory, shame, affection, and disgust are not displayed but processed—broken down and recombined into new interpretive material. The apartment becomes both stomach and archive, a space where experiences are not stored intact but continuously reconfigured. This process resonates with psychoanalytic thought, particularly the notion that psychic life is structured through repetition, transformation, and the ongoing reworking of trauma.

© Nadia Rodionova from "Moon Cat"

© Nadia Rodionova from "Moon Cat" 

© Nadia Rodionova from "Moon Cat"

In this regard, Rodionova’s project can be productively read alongside the legacy of psychoanalysis, especially in relation to desire as a generative force. For Jacques Lacan, desire is never simply directed toward an object but is instead structured by lack and displacement. Moon Cat reflects this dynamic: the father’s absence, the fractured domestic space, and the unstable status of memory all function as sites where desire circulates without resolution, producing forms of knowledge that are always partial and deferred.

© Nadia Rodionova from "Moon Cat"

© Nadia Rodionova from "Moon Cat"

At the same time, the project inevitably touches on the dimension of the forbidden. The act of entering and documenting a private space without consent evokes a lineage of artistic practices concerned with voyeurism and transgression. Here the work recalls the uneasy ethics explored by artists such as Sophie Calle, where observation is never innocent and looking always carries an element of intrusion. Rodionova does not resolve this tension; instead, she keeps it active, allowing discomfort to remain embedded in the work’s structure.

© Nadia Rodionova from "Moon Cat"

Ultimately, Moon Cat is less a documentary project than a reflection on how memory is constructed through acts that are simultaneously affectionate and invasive. It asks what it means to preserve something that resists preservation, and whether the act of remembering can ever be disentangled from the violence of selection. In transforming familial space into layered digital and material reconstructions, Rodionova produces a neo-familiar lexicon of images—fragile, contaminated, and necessary—through which memory becomes not a stable archive but an ongoing, metabolically charged process of becoming.

Nadia Rodionova (website)