"The tree of knowledge is not that of life" is an exploration that I take on to find out about my family's past after decades-long period of exile and process of forgetting.
My Grandfather's family escaped the Genocide of Ingrian Finns in the 1940's. Ingrian Finns are a Finnish speaking Christian minority that lived in a region in the Soviet Union, near St. Petersburg. Their language and religion was seen as a threat to the Soviet Union and during the 1930’s a third of the whole people were killed. Before the end of 1940’s 150,000 Ingrians were either exiled, executed or taken to prison camps.
Because I can’t travel to Russia, I experiment with alternative ways to photograph Ingrian land. I use Google Street View as a basis for my photographs. The unreal scenery that is taken by an automatic machine and then manipulated and censored by an AI acts as a metaphor of distance and generational memories. I can travel through those places, but can only dream of reaching the past.
