Igor Samolet’s project "Everything we remember"

Using the documentation of his daily activity on social networks as material for installations, the author turns to the themes of everyday life, personal and collective memory.

In the new project Igor Samolet presents a fantastic urban landscape of a distant catastrophic future. The main hall of the foundation will turn into a dilapidated ruin of a mysterious religious building, standing in the middle of a littered wasteland. The walls of the building are covered with documentation of images from the author’s "stories" on social networks - a short-term message format in which the content lives no more than a day. Inside the abandoned "chapel of memory" we will hear a robotic recitative to the sound of dying planets. The lyrics to this song are the letters found inside the "memory capsules" laid at the end of the twentieth century, the contents of which the author has been collecting over the past few years. In these notes, people of the past turn to us in the present, envy us and fantasize about the utopian future in which we now live.To these documents, Airplane adds the words of his contemporaries, inviting them to present an image of the distant future and leave a message to posterity. Around the forgotten memorial lies a variety of trash: things abandoned by the people of the future, as if in a hurry left the planet, digital garbage and other artifacts of the cult and life of dead civilizations.

Choosing an ironic form of post-apocalyptic fiction, Igor Samolet points us to the state of the day with extraordinary insight. Working within the framework of the documentary genre, by means of recording an Internet diary, the author is looking for signs of social change in moments of personal history. Analyzing the collective digital body, the artist captures the moment of transition of how an event that is important only for the personal history of an individual person suddenly becomes important for many and turns out to be the leitmotif of a whole generation.

Igor Samolet was born in 1984 in the north of Russia. In 2013 he graduated from the Moscow School of Photography and Multimedia. A. Rodchenko in the direction of "Project photography". In 2013 he released the photobook be happy!, which won a silver medal in the German Photobook Award 2014 and was included in the third volume of The History of Photobooks edited by Martin Parr. The Drunken Confessions and Breakfast for Artyom projects were shortlisted for the Innovation Prize in 2018. Participant of the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art grant program (2018–2019; 2019–2020). In 2019, Igor Samolet won the prestigious Credit Suisse and Cosmoscow awards for young artists. In 2019, the personal project "Energy of Error" was shown at the Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow. Participant of "FOTO WIEN", 7th Photographic Triennial. Hamburg, 18th Athens Photo Festival, Circulation (s) 2018,Festival of Young European Photography, Plat (t) form 18, X Moscow International Festival of Fashion and Style in Photography 2017, Voices Off Festival, F / STOP 2016 photography festival, Riga photomonth, Manifesta 10, Vienna photo book festival, Ural Industrial Biennale 2020 and others.