Elizaveta Porodina: silent dreams

“What does it mean to be a good person?” asks Elizaveta Porodina. “How do kindness and dignity express themselves in human behaviour?” These questions guide her thinking and inform her practice, but her work doesn’t seek to answer them explicitly. Instead, it suggests a different kind of knowing: one that is cerebral, surreal, and sublime in its strangeness.

Porodina was born in Moscow and moved to Germany with her family as a teenager. Caught between languages, locations, and ways of being, she turned to art as a medium for understanding the world around her. She went on to study psychology, hoping to map the many territories of feeling, but found the practice offered distance rather than connection or expression. Photography returned her to something more essential, something that reminded her of where she belonged. “This is where my homeland is,” she says. “My native land is imagery.”

We spoke to Porodina about her work and the many things that exist beneath its surface: oneiric threads, the subconscious, and the life of an image before and after it reaches our screens.

hube: Culture creates stories and myths about good and evil, beauty and harmony. Your journey has led you through many different worlds. How do you perceive your cultural identity today?

Elizaveta Porodina: I think that the closest way I can answer this question is to talk about my personal journey. What kind of community, what kind of world, do I see myself in? I have always struggled with where to place myself, so I kind of see myself as a nomad: a traveller between worlds or an astronaut isolated from them.

Watching people in their various worlds connect and laugh and speak to each other, seeing them exchange verbal and nonverbal signals… for many different reasons, these interactions were sort of unattainable for me, and that made me feel isolated. I always felt like I didn’t fully belong to one culture or another.

When I was a child living in Russia, I found it hard to connect with key aspects of the lifestyle—it seemed quite intense to me. When I moved to Germany at 13, I found it challenging to adapt to another very different way of dealing with emotions. When I started studying psychology, I developed a strong cognitive understanding of people’s emotional behaviour, but I didn’t feel an emotional connection to it.

So, I think the first 23 years of my life were an odyssey, a journey to discover my own identity and to feel good and accepted. I found both acceptance and my way of expressing myself by going back to my roots. This is where my homeland is. My native land is imagery. This is what I understand. This is what I feel. And this is how I can express myself most authentically.

h: When we try to understand the world, questions often prove more important than answers. What questions are most essential to you right now?

EP: I agree with that. My questions are:

What does it mean to be a good person?

How do kindness and dignity express themselves in human behaviour?

What can a person do to have a positive influence on their immediate environment?
What is the essence and core of happiness and fulfilment?

Those are my biggest questions at the moment. This is what I’m asking myself pretty much every day.

h: Colour is an artistic tool. At the same time, the experience and use of colour is intuitive and deeply personal. How do colour and emotion connect for you?

EP: Colour is one of my key artistic tools, but it’s not the only one. To be honest, it’s hard to answer this question because I don’t think that it is a conscious connection or one that I want to explore consciously. When I work on my images, I never go, “Oh, blue stands for melancholy, green means happiness, and yellow means I’m schizophrenic.” It’s not like that at all, it’s more intuitive and subconscious; a decision that I make in a very—well, not laissez-faire or whatever—but in a very lighthearted kind of way.

Rather than having a conceptual Bible about what colour means to me and then religiously applying it to my images, I want my decisions to come from the heart. I want people to feel the way the colour adds a certain twist to a situation rather than having to try to understand what the colour means to me, because it has to be personal for the audience as well.

h: Deconstructed images often carry a sense of fragility and ephemerality—yet, at the same time, they can be strangely alluring. Why do you think that is?

EP: I think it’s subjective. Even this question reflects your own very subjective, very careful, very delicate, very respectful way of engaging with art. Personally, I don’t think there is a single rule; everyone consumes images in a very different way and this is something that artists cannot control.

You never know how people will ingest these things, right? You wish for them to be respectful and delicate, but sometimes people will look at something that you’ve created and will be like, “I don’t get it. This is shit. I don’t like it.” And that’s because it doesn’t connect with them, or they read into it very intensely and project something that is purely their own—it has nothing to do with you. As an artist, I don’t think that kind of response is a bad or unwanted thing.

As long as you create, as long as you open the door and offer a vast landscape of possibilities for people to think, to feel, to reflect, to start conversations… That is all that I could wish for as an artist. Because, personally, this is getting very deep and very philosophical, I don’t think that humans can see themselves very clearly. Sometimes, people will look at the work and reflect on it, and then you’ll also see it differently. You’ll see yourself differently. For me, as a person who wants to constantly evolve and uncover different aspects of my being—which are a multitude and infinite—this is a very desirable thing. Why would I ever be opposed to a new view of myself, especially if someone is taking the time to reflect on my work at all? That’s such a privilege, right? So, I’m like, do whatever you want.

The biggest gift you can give another human is to see them, and to reflect, and to see, and to give back. I don’t really like the word “feedback,” because it sounds very office-y, but giving feedback to other humans is that beautiful present—it creates the irresistible allure you were speaking about.

This is the nature of exchange in art as well. You’re looking at something and you say, “Wow, this reminds me of that thing from my life, from nature, from what I saw last week.” And there you go. That’s already beautiful.

h: Poetic rhythm is present in music, literature, architecture, and dance. It seems to resonate in your work as well. What is your relationship to pure poetry?

EP: I don’t know if I have a current relationship with poetry—like, just reading words on paper and ingesting them like that, probably less so. I think most of the poems I read nowadays are the lyrics of songs that I enjoy.

When I listen to music with words, I always try to read the lyrics in parallel because I feel like some musicians appear mostly as poets, who illustrate music with their words. Others express themselves best through music, and the words are just an accompaniment, which is also great. This question mostly makes me think about another question, which is: What is the artist’s most essential form of expression? When I look at an artist and I deconstruct their work, this is what I’m trying to understand.