Svetlana Bogomolova

Body Material and others

I’ve always been attracted by the global idea of ecology: how do organisms and materials coexist and how do they influence each other. It is always beautiful to notice this interconnection – like certain plants live only in certain conditions, people with certain temperament tend to live in certain climate type, etc..In order to learn nearly everything about a place it is enough to take a small particle of it and study it intensively.

“Body material” is a series of portraits of people living in the village of Sequeiros, near Nodar. In this series I took portraits of people in a usual way and did also portraits of something invisible in them: I grew funguses on molds with the body material of these people.

I asked people to give me a part of their bodies, like hair, or the water used after washing the hands. I also asked to collect some material in the air of the rooms they lived in, and I put them into nutritious substrate.

Asking people for parts of their bodies and revealing these hidden portraits was a very intimate process for me.

I took pictures of the places where the “material” came from, of the people who sacrificed a part of themselves as “material”, and of the funguses that had grown from it.

Later, the mold started to grow on the substrate. The photos of it, its forms and colours, are, in a way, unusual portraits of the individuals, with something hidden but always present.

I expected people to be apprehensive about giving something out of their own bodies-normally nobody wants to give anything out of their body unless it’s meant to be given toa wizard or a witch–but funguses are beautiful and strange and when people asked me what they were, it started a sort of game.

This project was more concerned with the place. At first I didn’t want to do funguses with people, but with the landscape, from the soil and leaves, but then I thought everything’s already growing there, everything’s already beautiful – the landscape doesn’t want any change,it’s happy like that. Because in the North we have to struggle to drive beauty out and make things better, growing funguses there makes more sense,where as here everything seems more relaxed and things grow naturally.

I feel this project is very intimate and delicate, not so much because of the result (photos and patterns), but the process of collecting material, communicating with people and nature – the project is about the process of growth.

“Body Material” was a study of the place, by going deep into it, by melting into it, and growing with it. Funguses prolong the past being. They are extended portraits of places and persons,manifestation of something that was there, but could never be seen on an ordinary photography.

The other part of my work in Nodar consisted in three videos pieces about the transient nature of everything about us, the finiteness that unites people, animals and landscape–which I don’t see as sad but as calm and poetic.

In the beginning, when I had just arrived there, I immediately noticed a newborn cat, a cat eating a rat and the constant flowing of water. All of this made me feel more feminine. In the videos I wasn’t struggling; for me it was about the nature, the rocks, the river.

This was my perception of Nodar: nothing like the over all depression of the North, where I come from, but self-sufficiency and the knowledge that everything will come and go. This knowledge is so ancient and feminine and gives me so much power–this may be called mysticism but it may simply be peacefulness and self-reliance.

Svetlana Bogomolova, born in 1981 in St. Petersburg, Russia. Currently live in Tartu, Estonia. She is graduated in media and publicity by the Tartu Art College. She Works in the areas of photography, video, performance, installation, graphic design and multimedia. She is a member of MoKS–Center for Art and Social Practice and has been participating in several exhibitions, screenings, performances, audio and video installations. She also works in the areas of video art, as a VJ and as a graphic designer.