Sasha Shevchenko

08 Recollection Series

In my recent work, salvage practices function as research, reconfiguring materials to suspend, review, and enrich my understanding of the relational environment from which our sense of life is being woven.Recollection lab is a fantastical expedition that utilizes the digital realm as a timeless void that mirrors the vastness of memory, upon which remembrance of human and object trajectories are explored.The floating objects, each found and suspended, or aged and warped, collect to postulate upon the spaces that I have left behind on my path as an immigrant and as a consumer.Feeling a curious sense of separation, I imagine the life that lives or dies without me. The circularity of all things, running parallel with our humanly courses. Informed by the stillness of abandonment in Pripyat, the ghost city near Chernobyl, this assemblage traces back to what I once knew, consumed, left, and what happened to it since – a gesture of reclamation that playfully delves into the possibilities of a narrative study of the material world - the world that we constantly rearrange and digest as the most entropic species on the planet.In the constant bodily journeys that we take, lie the forgotten dinner tables and acts of digestion, of rearrangement, that forever ties the resource and object to our bodies. It’s an acknowledgement of the fundamental interconnectedness of things, an entanglement that asks, what if we sat with the memories of what we ate? What we left and abandoned?What if we recollected?

“How is the life of materials altered once it begins to travel with us as an extension of human activity?”