Tracing Katya Selezneva's work between evidence and erasure

The material traces of liminal sites and the unpredictable hybrids of state power

Images that circulate widely on social media play a decisive role in shaping how social and political realities are produced, perceived, and contested. Far from being neutral, these images contribute to the formation of cultural and territorial identities, reinforcing dominant narratives while also holding the potential to disrupt, reframe, and resist them.

Within this context, Der Greif “Local Voices” continues to foreground situated perspectives and collaborative authorship as a way of slowing down image circulation and re-embedding images within their social, cultural, and political conditions. Through an ongoing exercise in co-writing, the project examines how visual practices can counter homogenizing narratives and support more plural, democratic forms of representation by insisting on specificity, locality, and dialogue, foregrounding situated knowledge over dominant or centralized narratives.

In this conversation, we delve into Katya Selezneva’s search for a practice that articulates the reality of places caught in limbo. By treating photography as a sculptural and processual process of documenting, Selezneva moves beyond mainstream aesthetics to engage with ‘plasticity’, here defined as the capacity for an image to transform and resist through its own materiality. This approach addresses the "not yet to be" by capturing how environmental decay and shifting archival narratives physically alter historical memory.

Selezneva explores instability and displacement through photography, installation, and video. Her practice treats landscapes as memory carriers, utilizing personal and institutional archives to investigate how evidence is manipulated into myth. By focusing on the fragmentation of migration and the physical instability of the photographic image, she constructs narratives of absence and loss within contemporary ecological and political crises.

Ilaria Sponda: Your work deeply resonates with my interest in moving beyond mainstream aesthetics to explore the blending of photography, sculpture, and installation for example. In your project “Whiteout,” you utilize a process of re-photographing existing imagery. What draws you to this technique, and once these "re-photographs" are circulated, what narratives do they reveal about the history and environment of the places they depict?

Katya Selezneva: While I often work with archives, “Whiteout” was the first time I felt compelled to use re-photography. The project began in a city in the far north with a heavy historical burden, where the narratives of the Soviet era, the Gulag system, and a unique ecological situation intersect. While working with archival materials, I encountered recurring variations in the way identical images were captioned. These images circulate through media, newspapers, and public spaces, and their meaning shifts depending on the era and the political context in which they are displayed. Beyond the shifting historical narrative, I became fascinated by the physical life of these images. In the city, archival photos are sometimes displayed outdoors on public panels protected by plastic. The climate there is incredibly harsh; the displays are buried under snow for months. As the snow melts, the moisture deforms the panels and the photographs themselves. The images begin to carry the physical traces of the place they represent. By re-photographing them in this state, I am capturing that deformation, transforming a flat historical record into a material object that speaks to both the erasure of history and the power of the environment. I started working on this project in 2022, and have since repeatedly returned to the same sites, driven by an urgent, almost reluctant necessity to witness their transformation. By revisiting these specific coordinates, I can observe how the harsh climate and human intervention shift the landscape. Deep cracks now fracture the walls, rendering these once-imposing buildings dangerous and hollow. Monuments to a past that is being physically deconstructed by the environment.

IS: Your practice seamlessly integrates photography with sculpture and installation. How do you conceptually bridge these mediums, and how does the idea of plasticity allow you to move away from traditional structures of power and control toward a more collaborative relationship with your subjects?

KS: I’ve begun thinking about plasticity in an expanded way, influenced by Catherine Malabou. To me, plasticity isn’t just about an object changing its shape or adapting to a container. It’s a potential for resistance. In our current global climate, so many systems, whether government, science, or religion, are built on the project of control and domination over nature and people. By applying the concept of plasticity to my work, I’m looking for a way to coexist with the world rather than dictate to it. When I combine photography with sculptural elements or found natural objects, I’m allowing the materials to shape the work through their own history and decay. It’s a way of thinking that rejects the "project of control" in favor of a more fluid, transformative process. Plasticity becomes a counter-language in the sense that doesn't dominate the landscape or the image but instead finds strength in the ability to change, resist, and endure.

IS: Your work often highlights how environmental traces physically transform the photographic image. Beyond this layering of materiality, how is memory, both personal and collective, built into your practice, and how do these traces reveal the underlying power structures of a place?

KS: While my personal experience is often the starting point, I rarely focus on individual stories; instead, I am drawn to large-scale narratives of place. To me, memory is a process of sampling and combining layers, like archives, found texts, sounds, and physical objects, to see how different systems of power and politics of memory operate. I am driven by material traces because they make these heavy historical or political themes more subtle and tangible. These traces show how nature, ecology, and the state intersect: sometimes a community or government chooses to erase these marks, leaving them to disappear in neglected corners, while in other instances, the traces are so persistent that they force us to confront them. By engaging with this plasticity, or the way these records transform and resist, I try to capture the tension between what a place wants to forget and what the material itself refuses to let go.

IS: In your work in Georgia, you’ve focused on Mtatsminda park in Tbilisi, a place that seems to exist as a liminal site within the city. How does this hidden, unregulated natural space serve as a sanctuary for diverse identities, and how does the environment itself act as an active participant in the narratives you capture?

KS: Tbilisi is a city of intense contradictions, still deeply patriarchal yet dynamically leaning toward the future, and Mtatsminda sits right at the center of that tension. While it holds deep religious and cultural myths, this urban forest created during the Soviet era has become a unique, unregulated spaceshaped by its physical inaccessibility and limited external control. This difficulty of access creates a liminal sanctuary where groups that might otherwise clash or feel unsafe. It is a place where you can be who you are, shielded by the terrain. In this project, which I am working on together with Vladimir Seleznev, we view the park not just as a backdrop, but as an actor with its own voice. It is constantly being reshaped by the weather, the movement of animals, and the physical traces left by those who seek refuge there. Because there is no surveillance, thus no cameras or official oversight once you move deep into the slope, the forest becomes a living archive of these hidden social practices. We are interested in how the mountain transforms night by night, carrying the material traces of human presence and natural shift, proving that even in a heavily regulated political climate, there are still spaces that remain not yet defined.

IS: This interest in hidden layers and liminal sites seems to be a recurring motive in your practice, whether you are exploring new territories or looking back at Russia. In your project “There Round the Corner in the Deep,” how did you uncover the unpredictable hybrids of state power?

KS: Yes, I find myself looking for these repeating motives across different geographies. In Russia, this manifested through my work in the closed administrative-territorial entity (ZATO), a city best known as Sarov. It’s a place where the history of the Soviet nuclear program and Orthodox religious tradition intersect. This phenomenon is often described as "nuclear orthodoxy," a paradoxical construction where military technology, state power, and religious symbolism are fused together. For me it’s an anxious and symptomatic hybrid that shapes the reality of the country today. This project grew out of an attempt to engage with my personal history and to explore these ideological layers that shouldn’t logically coexist but do. By documenting these intersections, I’m trying to understand the tension of a society built on the combined weight of nuclear capability and ancient faith, a landscape where the state’s imperatives are masked by myth and mystery.