Alёna Koleso (credited as Alena Kolesnikova at that time) is a watcher and a wanderer. Along her passages, photos become notes jotted on places and sound recordings a record of experience. Through photography and drawing, field recordings and listening practices, she translates thoughts into lines, bodies into landscapes, experiences into memories, and objects into artifacts.

Kolesnikova first came to art through her interest in alternative ways of living, by exploring underground punk communities, circular economies, and independent farming and agriculture. As a student in Moscow, she often followed friends as they tagged graffiti around the city under the cover of darkness. By morning it would all be buffed out. Documenting these fugitive urban markings became a pursuit against disappearing, whispering, existing, and non-existing.  

Over the last several years, Kolesnikova has begun working on a project about her ancestral village. Called Novovoskresenskoe, its name translates as New Resurrection, though like many small rural regions it now risks falling into oblivion under Russia’s relentless urban sprawl. Kolesnikova spent long months there growing up, and until this year she returned each summer to tend to the soil, trees, memories, and legends of the past. Fables her grandfather told her once gave her the courage as a child to pierce the dark forest. Later, they gave her the tenacity to cross borders and new frontiers. Now, amid the ongoing disaster of war, Kolesnikova reflects what it means to lose home. Through deep listening and looking, walking, eluding, and vanishing, she deciphers roots, branches, and traces. Those of the forest and her own.

Text: Amanda Saroff
Medium: installation, photography, drawing, sound, field recordings
Documentation: Romy Finke
Context: Open Studios, Jan van Eyck Academie
Participation: 2021–2022

Participant presentation 1, 2022
Participant presentation 2, 2022
Girls Like Us, Letters of Disappointment, 2022 (Drawing contribution)
JVE Open Studios Announcement – E-flux