Vestiges: Archived Lyviv 2019

“As with the movement of transitional memory, this materialisation of traumatic and ghostly agencies essentially found its way into place. Indeed, it was precisely through the reappearance of traumatic memory within the ruins of the built environment that the ghost was given form and mass…………….What, then, of this strange agency that accompanies all remembering: this ghost of memory, this memory of ghosts?”

Dylan Trigg The Memory of Place Ohio University Press

Lyviv holds many stories in its cobbled streets and narrow passages, the pavements worn, the sound of the trams that rattle through time and the streets. There is an essence of memory coalescing with imagination in the nostalgia of the place and spaces of the city. The iconography of the street, vintage signs and images, the icon of the photographic image of the mother of the city – of the land – the holy mother and the essence of motherhood.

Vestiges: Lyviv 2019 recalls a memory of place, of the city, of Lyviv. The fibres of silk and cotton are embedded with a linen embroidered cloth found in the market in central Lyviv. The found object of memory – the vintage photograph of the family, the mother, the archetypal domestic female is embraced by the dye sublimation image of the cultural Mother – the cultural female, wearing traditional Ukraine costume. The visual research was collected during a visit to the city in 2018.