I spent most of my childhood in the country with my grandparents. Together we picked strawberries from the beds, and in the evenings, we baked potatoes on a fire.

Now I live in a typical new building in a densely populated suburb of Moscow. There are all amenities, shops and other infrastructure within walking distance, but the apartment looks empty, faceless, devoid of warmth and comfort.

A few years ago, I felt it especially hard after moving into it. Childhood memories made me acutely feel discomfort and loneliness. I was filling my home with items that were needed in the interior or simply decorative, designed to create coziness, but the emptiness of the new space continued to press on me with the same force.

I've been into Polaroid photography for a long time. In the digital age, I like slightly blurry snapshots on yellowish paper: they seem to extract forgotten moments from the past, change the sense of belonging to the present time for the depicted objects.

I photograph fragments of my new apartment on a Polaroid, and my grandparents' country house takes on a more pronounced shape in my memory, and the faceless space of a modern apartment is painted, albeit illusory, in the warm tones of childhood memories.

Polden is a Russian word that means Midday

2021-2022