Topothesia

“Topothesia” is an ancient Greek concept for a “fictitious place.” Home often feels like this—a place, but not quite a real one. A site that is always obscured and embellished by memories and contradictory feelings. Landscape serves as a portal into an otherwise abstract terrain of “home.” This series, in particular, presents several iterations on my native swamps, overlaid with second-hand memories and deja-vus.

The swamp in Belarusian culture and tradition is more than simply a location; it is almost a character. It is also a place of extreme ambiguity and illusion, where nothing is what it seems. For me, it is a metaphor for what was left behind, for better and for worse. 

For many years, while the world around me was endlessly debating identity, I felt rootless and like I didn’t belong anywhere. Or rather, I felt that I didn’t belong to the place I was born and raised in - the only one I really knew. So I left my homeland thinking that immigration would offer a simple solution - discard the place and culture given to me and build an identity rooted elsewhere. The simplicity was, of course, a fantasy. Instead of easy answers came nostalgia and longing for familiar landscapes and understandable culture codes. Parts of myself got lost forever in translation, and living in a diaspora somehow felt like cheating. As any immigrant with experience will confirm, going back is never really an option - the place you long for doesn’t exist anymore, if it ever did.

Home becomes increasingly elusive, concealed in the murky stirring waters of complex and often contradictory feelings, a topothesia, a place where nothing is what it seems.