Krasnaya Sloboda  

Touching on the topic of heritage in present, I would like to go from the personal side, reflect on my identity as a resident of Kaliningrad and the granddaughter of immigrants from different regions of Russia, to understand whether it affects my self-identity the experience of my ancestors before moving to Kaliningrad, how others respond to me regional roots.  

My grandmothers and grandfathers moved to the Kaliningrad region in the early 1960s from Sverdlovsk, Smolensk and Tula regions. But my closest connection is with grandmother from Tula, since my grandmother is from Tula Almost raised me and for many years as a child we went every summer to the Tula village of Krasnaya Sloboda, where I also absorbed some traditions, views on life, culture of communication, imbued with the atmosphere and everyday life. Grandmother Valentina Tikhonovna has a constancy of character and rigor of character; she has worked for the same worker all her life place at a confectionery factory and earned the title “Veteran of Labor”.  

In his In this project I am working with my home archive. I create collages from old and not so old photographs, I separate the image of my grandmother and myself from the reality in which they were filmed and moving them to new spaces: grandmother in Kaliningradskaya region, myself to Tula, thereby I want to show how he influenced me grandmotherly character. It is no coincidence that the collages are located on the wood cuts, since the tree and the tree cuts are a metaphor for the family tree, the transfer (relocation) and procreation in other spaces.  

Name project — this is the name of that very Tula village “Krasnaya Sloboda”. How do I my grandmother told me that the word “red” in this case has a meaning “beautiful”, and the settlement is the (obsolete) outskirts of the city; suburb. It seems to me that Our Kaliningrad region is also, to some extent, a red (beautiful) settlement. outskirts of Russia, as it is a kind of UltimaThule - a very distant region for the country.