The Raft, Travel, 2009@SAIC studiophoto Katya Grokhovsky
From complete after-school-end-of-year-exhaustion and utter indulgent messy rest at the start of the week and 24hr life in bed to incredible times with friends and most inspirational lectures and speeches. I am full of gratitude. I shed some thank-you-tears and become sentimental and emotionally attached. I am attached to this place. At peace, but not at rest. Insatiable Traveling bugs are crawling all over me. My persistent gypsy spirit once awakened, slowly grows into a monster and I am ready to jump around the world.
However, before I temporarily leave the Chicago I fell in love with, I am going to attempt to symbolically interview myself aggressively, or perhaps, not, one more time and try to peel the layers of Katya Grokhovsky, as much as she, perhaps, will allow me to, or not.
K.G Katya?
K.G Yes?
K.G You are a mystery. An enigma. What are you hiding?
K.G Nothing much actually, I think I am a fictional enigma, or I'd like to think I am, or would like to be, or would like to create an illusion of. I am not sure at all about this, but it has been said to me on numerous occasions that I should open up more and reveal. I don't like to reveal. I like to conceal first.And then maybe, perhaps, very slowly, if it is the right place, time, people, person, etc.
K.G Sounds complicated . Don't you think?
K.G No, not really. I have a complex multi layered identity, some of which is a total construct.
K.G What do you mean by construct, who constructed it? How can that occur?
K.G It's very simple. I am a numerous immigrant. Well no, once an immigrant, always an immigrant. Emilia Kabakov said: once you migrate, you belong nowhere, to no place. Once you loose those roots, no roots can be re-grown. I agree with that. I have no roots. I like that. It makes, me, free? Well, freedom is very relative, but it does to some extent, exist. Australia is my adopted home, a surrogate, but I somehow feel more of an outsider there, than I do in America. I like America and so far, I think, I hope I truly wish, America likes me.
K.G Where is your home then?
K.G Right now Chicago. Melbourne has been home for a long time prior. My parents and long standing dear Friends are there. My histories are located three. Odessa, where I was born, is no longer home. Yet, once there, it is home completely. Home is an interesting notion I am not sure I truly understand. I have tried and tried to work with this question of home for a long time in my work and it somehow eventually manages to always fail and elude me. I think that is exactly what happens once you are an immigrant. You are always searching for something you lost, or know you want or need, but can never really find again. This is why I relate a lot to the work of Illya Kabakov. The Soviet mystery. The loss, the tragedy, the history, the place that is no longer, which is of course, a universal loss of home and childhood. I realized to my astonishment, that Kabakov, being the age of my parents, is the one who experienced what my parents experienced. They are the ones who went through true tragedy of immigration in the middle of their lives. I did not. I was 15 years old. Yes, I remember everything, but I did not have my whole life established somewhere else, prior to leaving. I finally understood why I cannot truly work with these notions, the Soviet subject. I have to work with it through my parents.
K.G I hoped you'd talk more about your actual personal experience of immigration to Australia.
K.G It is a long painful story. I never wanted to go there. I never wanted to live there. I was a minor, I had no say.We just left. It was a devastating experience. It was like a death, whilst being alive. I'm not explaining it all that well or articulating it perfectly, but it felt incredibly surreal. For the first 3 years there, I kept writing a lot of my observations down, thinking I will be going back, telling and showing my then girlfriends, what I saw and experienced. Many letters I wrote to them kept returning to me. my world as I knew it was dead to me. At that tender age, I had to re-emerge, re-appear as another. A construct somewhat. However, I of course, received great education in Australia, two magnificent bachelor degrees and do love the city of Melbourne, which holds a special place in my consciousness. But I always wanted More.
K.G More?
K.G More.
to be continued...........
I am sure the layers have not been peeled.....
Lectures attended:
Illya and Emilia Kabakov @MCA
Kerry James Marshall @MCA
SAIC Commencement Graduation ceremony
Architecture foundation boat cruise
Public light and space opening
Movie: Women without men by
Shirin Neshat
Plans, trains, buses await.
To NYC.
