Maria Pleshkova: Innerscapes
Days of War: A Pillow Book
'War' and 'Waiting' begin with the same letter.
I'm not a soldier's mother, neither am I a soldier's wife.
But I know what it feels like when the loved one goes to war.
© Maria Pleshkova and José Bautista, Days of War
Length: 04:16
2012
It happened to me - and war became a very personal matter. It became part of my life, of my thoughts and soul. For a while it dominated me. I spent my time waiting, worrying, counting days and hoping for the best. I couldn’t unglue myself from thinking about the conflict zone, I spent days following the news and photos. I began to have dreams about war. I wished I had been there. Every single day I was hoping to get a message from my friend saying that he was alive and well. Sometimes I felt it was the conflict zone - not my peaceful city - where real life was going on. I felt like a character in a play or simply a puppet. Everything around me seemed artificial.
War was being fought out there. And everything was changing: the country and people in distant places, the global political situation… I was changing, too.
Now it's all over. The loved one came back, alive and well. But I think that war left a stigma on me, a kind of incurable deformity.
View Exhibition: Days of War
This project is based on Maria’s personal experience. She stayed in Moscow as she was not able to follow her partner who had gone to cover the war in Libya as a journalist. To fight her worries and her despair she starts to make self-portraits showing what she goes through on a daily basis, then she draws a parallel with the events in Libya. The text, deliberately very formal, like the newspapers headlines, contrasts with the photographs, very intimate, recounting the story of her inner space.
Each book spread represents one day: the image shows what happened in Maria’s life and the text tells what happened in another person’s life on the same day.
Altogether, the images and the texts tell a story about waiting. This story is archetypal and refers, for example, to the story of Penelope waiting for Odyssey.
Book Presentation
Book "After War: a Pillow Book " presentation video
Length: 03:10
When I finished this project, I showed it to the person to whom I dedicated this project. I think he was a bit shocked, but in the end, he didn’t mind if I published this work.