“What is the first memory of the Shlygin family that comes to mind?” — served as an opening question for the survey that contemporary artist Sasha Kochetkova did about her own family. From these conversations, she pieced together a model of relationships, with threads leading from her family home to other people and places. Displayed on screens in the exhibition space, this model reveals a story that cannot be reduced to a single line or a single account. Instead, it unfolds through multiple stories that intersect, sustain one another, or contradict each other — including stories that have never been told. Each account, in turn, does more than bear witness to the past or the present: it also shapes them.
Sasha Kochetkova, a Paris-based artist, developed this project during an art residency in Kolomna, the town where she grew up. Over the course of a month, she worked on what would become the exhibition 24 Nodes for My Grandparents. The project’s curator Lesha Prokofiev has interviewed Sasha for </odra>.
Sasha Kochetkova, a Paris-based artist, developed this project during an art residency in Kolomna, the town where she grew up. Over the course of a month, she worked on what would become the exhibition 24 Nodes for My Grandparents. The project’s curator Lesha Prokofiev has interviewed Sasha for </odra>.
24 Nodes for My Grandparents' exhibition, photo: Karina Gradusova
L: Since we opened the exhibiton in August, you have left Kolomna and returned to France. Looking back, how do you feel about it now?
S: I explore relationships through other people’s memories and knowledge. Knowledge only becomes meaningful in the moment of transmission, but with every act of transmission, it changes. This became an important conceptual layer of the project.
I was collecting memories of my family and conducting short interviews with neighbours, relatives and former colleagues. At some point, I noticed that one of my neighbors was avoiding me in the street — she would hide inside the house when she saw me. It became clear that she did not want to talk to me, that she did not want to pass her knowledge on to me. Another woman, on the contrary, told me a story about court proceedings that she had never shared before. This story did not fit the more flattering version of the family history that had been passed down to me. All of this became part of the project. Ultimately, this work is about people and relationships.
S: I explore relationships through other people’s memories and knowledge. Knowledge only becomes meaningful in the moment of transmission, but with every act of transmission, it changes. This became an important conceptual layer of the project.
I was collecting memories of my family and conducting short interviews with neighbours, relatives and former colleagues. At some point, I noticed that one of my neighbors was avoiding me in the street — she would hide inside the house when she saw me. It became clear that she did not want to talk to me, that she did not want to pass her knowledge on to me. Another woman, on the contrary, told me a story about court proceedings that she had never shared before. This story did not fit the more flattering version of the family history that had been passed down to me. All of this became part of the project. Ultimately, this work is about people and relationships.
Sasha Kochetkova's family archive
People themselves chose whether or not to speak to me, what to tell me and what to leave outside the conversation. I then selected the fragments to be included or left out. The final form of the project was shaped not only by what was said, but also by silence, refusal and absence.
There can be no definitive or objective version of this history. What emerges is not so much a family archive as one possible configuration of memory and relationships.
And I like the fact that this configuration is shaped by particular subjects — by people, their decisions, their relationships and my own presence. That is what prevents the system from becoming static or universal. It remains alive, human. The project is about the human within the technical.
There can be no definitive or objective version of this history. What emerges is not so much a family archive as one possible configuration of memory and relationships.
And I like the fact that this configuration is shaped by particular subjects — by people, their decisions, their relationships and my own presence. That is what prevents the system from becoming static or universal. It remains alive, human. The project is about the human within the technical.
L: Artists are often invited to residencies far from home. You, on the contrary, traveled back home from afar. Can you tell us about that?
S: This really became one of the important characteristics of the project. Usually, an artist in residence works with a local context, but even if the residency lasts a year, the artist remains, to some extent, an outside observer.
I grew up in Kolomna, so in my case there was almost no such distance. I was working with a place I know very well and with a history that is directly connected to me. Several generations of my family lived in Kolomna, and our family home is still there. It is an early twentieth-century private house where my grandparents lived, where my mother grew up, and where I spent a significant part of my own childhood. The house has always been a place of attraction, safety and memory for me.
But during the residency, something shifted unexpectedly. For the first time, I was living in Kolomna not in that house, but someplace else. It allowed me to look at a city I knew so well from the position of someone who simultaneously belongs to it and is at a distance from it.
It became a kind of alternative way of inhabiting my own past.
Something similar happened with the family history. As I was working, it gradually ceased being a flat, already-known narrative. Through other people’s memories, it became more three-dimensional: new connections, contradictions, discrepancies and previously unknown aspects began to emerge.
S: This really became one of the important characteristics of the project. Usually, an artist in residence works with a local context, but even if the residency lasts a year, the artist remains, to some extent, an outside observer.
I grew up in Kolomna, so in my case there was almost no such distance. I was working with a place I know very well and with a history that is directly connected to me. Several generations of my family lived in Kolomna, and our family home is still there. It is an early twentieth-century private house where my grandparents lived, where my mother grew up, and where I spent a significant part of my own childhood. The house has always been a place of attraction, safety and memory for me.
But during the residency, something shifted unexpectedly. For the first time, I was living in Kolomna not in that house, but someplace else. It allowed me to look at a city I knew so well from the position of someone who simultaneously belongs to it and is at a distance from it.
It became a kind of alternative way of inhabiting my own past.
Something similar happened with the family history. As I was working, it gradually ceased being a flat, already-known narrative. Through other people’s memories, it became more three-dimensional: new connections, contradictions, discrepancies and previously unknown aspects began to emerge.
L: You work with virtual spaces and AI-generated images, and we have talked about the “digital logic” you use. What does the material you work with mean to you? As McLuhan put it, “the medium is the message.” What does this medium communicate in your context?
S: When we talk about 24 Nodes, my answer to this question has two parts. The first concerns the idea of the co-adjustment of the medium and the human. McLuhan suggests looking at the medium not simply as a channel through which information passes, but as an environment that itself changes what passes through it. For me, it is therefore important not only what I transmit, but how that transmission takes place.
In this sense, I am close to Simondon’s idea that humans and technical environments are formed together. The medium in 24 Nodes does not simply serve an already existing human subjectivity — it reconfigures the relationships between people, while those relationships in turn reconfigure the interface.
I used VR to create a local digital environment in which relationships between people and stories become a space that can be navigated non-linearly. One story connects to another; from one you can move to the next; there are different distances between the stories. It is a space with its own logic of memory.
At the same time, it was important to me that this world should not look like an abstract technological environment. It needed to remain connected to a specific place and to specific people. That is why, in the exhibition, the screens are embedded in pieces of furniture from my family home, which we brought specifically for the installation.
The house becomes a kind of central node, while the digital structure becomes its invisible informational layer. The screens function as windows into this layer.
S: When we talk about 24 Nodes, my answer to this question has two parts. The first concerns the idea of the co-adjustment of the medium and the human. McLuhan suggests looking at the medium not simply as a channel through which information passes, but as an environment that itself changes what passes through it. For me, it is therefore important not only what I transmit, but how that transmission takes place.
In this sense, I am close to Simondon’s idea that humans and technical environments are formed together. The medium in 24 Nodes does not simply serve an already existing human subjectivity — it reconfigures the relationships between people, while those relationships in turn reconfigure the interface.
I used VR to create a local digital environment in which relationships between people and stories become a space that can be navigated non-linearly. One story connects to another; from one you can move to the next; there are different distances between the stories. It is a space with its own logic of memory.
At the same time, it was important to me that this world should not look like an abstract technological environment. It needed to remain connected to a specific place and to specific people. That is why, in the exhibition, the screens are embedded in pieces of furniture from my family home, which we brought specifically for the installation.
The house becomes a kind of central node, while the digital structure becomes its invisible informational layer. The screens function as windows into this layer.
The second idea concerns the narrative aspect of the project.
One of the things I find most interesting in working with digital media — and in my practice more generally — is error and imperfection. With every act of transmission, something is preserved and something disappears. Someone chooses not to tell a story. I fail to hear something, or decide not to include it. Something changes already in the process of recording, transcribing, editing, or translating from voice into text and from text into a digital structure.
It was important for me to leave space for subjectivity in the project. That is why, alongside the digital component, we created a printed booklet containing transcriptions of the stories and my own comments.
I did not want to create the impression of a perfect, complete or objective archive. On the contrary, I wanted to show that this archive was assembled by a particular person, in a particular place and at a particular moment. It is alive, perforated by silences, subjective and imperfect.
One of the things I find most interesting in working with digital media — and in my practice more generally — is error and imperfection. With every act of transmission, something is preserved and something disappears. Someone chooses not to tell a story. I fail to hear something, or decide not to include it. Something changes already in the process of recording, transcribing, editing, or translating from voice into text and from text into a digital structure.
It was important for me to leave space for subjectivity in the project. That is why, alongside the digital component, we created a printed booklet containing transcriptions of the stories and my own comments.
I did not want to create the impression of a perfect, complete or objective archive. On the contrary, I wanted to show that this archive was assembled by a particular person, in a particular place and at a particular moment. It is alive, perforated by silences, subjective and imperfect.
L: Do you feel that your work with this subject is complete? Or does it feel more like a stage, a step towards something else?
S: If I continue with the metaphor of the house, I feel that I have only just entered the hallway. It is no longer the beginning, but there is still a lot of space ahead. Overall, this project — and our work together — helped me understand much more precisely where I want to go next.
I would like to continue developing the project because, in one month, I was only able to realise part of what emerged during the process. I am now interested in making the digital structure more interactive and rebuilding it in different software that would allow for more possibilities of interaction between the nodes, so that the idea of reconfiguration could begin to operate on a technological level.
S: If I continue with the metaphor of the house, I feel that I have only just entered the hallway. It is no longer the beginning, but there is still a lot of space ahead. Overall, this project — and our work together — helped me understand much more precisely where I want to go next.
I would like to continue developing the project because, in one month, I was only able to realise part of what emerged during the process. I am now interested in making the digital structure more interactive and rebuilding it in different software that would allow for more possibilities of interaction between the nodes, so that the idea of reconfiguration could begin to operate on a technological level.
Then a rather simple but important question emerges for me: what happens to memory if an archive stops being a place of storage and becomes a system that continues to change itself?
In my new projects, I plan to continue exploring the same line of research — systems of transmission and the moments when transmission breaks down or does not happen as expected. When errors occur.
L: Returning to our project, how do you see its relationship to the present moment? Why was it important to address these questions now, and why in this particular way?
Today, we are constantly moving between different environments, both physical and digital. The world around us is changing faster and faster, and we change along with it. Memory transforms more slowly, but it is not a stable substance either. It is constantly reconstructed under the influence of the present. And like any information environment, it is subject to selection, editing, control and manipulation.
That is why I think it is important to return to small, horizontal narratives that do not claim to offer the only explanation of the past. A personal history allows us to see how any narrative is constructed in the first place: who speaks, who listens, what is preserved, what disappears, and who has the power to select and shape the structure of memory.
For me, it is particularly important to preserve the possibility of questioning my own version of history. I am not trying to replace one conventional narrative with another. What matters more to me is creating a space where multiple versions can coexist, and where the very mechanisms through which they are formed become visible.
In the Russian context, this takes on an additional urgency. Under conditions of censorship, information polarisation and increasing control, working with personal history becomes one way of preserving a space for independent thought and reflection.
L: Returning to our project, how do you see its relationship to the present moment? Why was it important to address these questions now, and why in this particular way?
Today, we are constantly moving between different environments, both physical and digital. The world around us is changing faster and faster, and we change along with it. Memory transforms more slowly, but it is not a stable substance either. It is constantly reconstructed under the influence of the present. And like any information environment, it is subject to selection, editing, control and manipulation.
That is why I think it is important to return to small, horizontal narratives that do not claim to offer the only explanation of the past. A personal history allows us to see how any narrative is constructed in the first place: who speaks, who listens, what is preserved, what disappears, and who has the power to select and shape the structure of memory.
For me, it is particularly important to preserve the possibility of questioning my own version of history. I am not trying to replace one conventional narrative with another. What matters more to me is creating a space where multiple versions can coexist, and where the very mechanisms through which they are formed become visible.
In the Russian context, this takes on an additional urgency. Under conditions of censorship, information polarisation and increasing control, working with personal history becomes one way of preserving a space for independent thought and reflection.
Sasha Kochetkova is a multidisciplinary artist of Russian origin, living and working in France. Her work has been exhibited in Paris, Rome, Turin and Belgrade, among others. She has participated in several biennales, including the Moscow International Biennale for Young Art (2016) and the Chuvash Biennale of Contemporary Art (2025). Her first solo museum exhibition took place at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art (MMOMA) in 2018. In 2024, she held her first solo exhibition in Paris, and in 2024 she was a finalist for the Italian Prisma Art Prize.
Lesha Prokofiev curates artistic projects at Artkommunalka, an artist residency in Kolomna. He is a co-founder of community space “kp pyl” at CCI Fabrika and artist-run space “spaceofunknownplace” as well as a member of “delai kulturu” collective.
The exhibition opened on August 28, 2026 at the Artkommunalka Museum-Residence in Kolomna and will remain open until mid-November, 2026.
editing: Andrei Savenkov
Lesha Prokofiev curates artistic projects at Artkommunalka, an artist residency in Kolomna. He is a co-founder of community space “kp pyl” at CCI Fabrika and artist-run space “spaceofunknownplace” as well as a member of “delai kulturu” collective.
The exhibition opened on August 28, 2026 at the Artkommunalka Museum-Residence in Kolomna and will remain open until mid-November, 2026.
editing: Andrei Savenkov
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