Coming of Age

I went to Crimea alone for the first time in 2015. I took a backpack and my friend’s iPod with the complete Talk Talk discography. 

I call this series “Coming of Age” – “Nezhnyj vozrast”, or “Tender Age” in Russian.

When I was a schoolgirl, I spent summer holidays in Crimean summer camps. This is a tradition left over from Soviet times, when, as now, parents sent their kids to spend just less than a month on the seaside.

Coming of age in Crimea is an idealistic picture of the world imbued with sincerity, of discovering sensuality in a safe place, dancing in the sunset, a counselor playing Radiohead on his guitar. You think about how you’re going to sneak out onto a secret beach with stones – not sand! – the water is clearer there, and along the way there is a huge mulberry tree. Violence in all its possible manifestations and politics is an adult game. 

I wanted to mark the place where a moment of timeless, idealistic youth transitions under the face of other people’s ideas. 

As Patti Smith sings in “Mary”:

At the edge of the world
Where you were no one
Yet you were the girl
The only one
At the edge of the world
In the desert heat
One shivering star
Sweet indiscreet

In a little narcissus pool
Drawn by its spell
We saw ourselves
Raw excitable
I knew you
When we were young
I knew you
Now you’re gone

We didn’t know
The precariousness
Of our young powers
All the emptiness

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