Visual Artist Sveta Kaverina is the Edge of Humanity Magazine contributor of this photo essay. From the project ‘Somewhere else’. To see Sveta’s body of work, click on any photograph.

I started this project to tell a story of the city I lived in for 7 years, the city I loved, I miss, I can never come back to. My memories do not fade with time but get more and more prominent and painful. Just like my feelings towards the city which become more and more complicated.

The project offers the spectator to think if it is at all possible for one to return to a place he knew well and loved truly, but then abandoned with regrets. Is there such a place in reality? Or does it exist only in one’s mind? Is it still a spot on a map, or is it already one’s idea of paradise lost? Does the city created of nostalgia and regrets have something in common with the real city?

Artist statement

When I approach my camera, I never know what will happen next. Even when I have an idea, a project, a series in my mind. Even when I get this itching inside me that tells me, it is coming, a photograph is about to reveal. Even then everything can happen to me, I am not protected from anything, I am ready for nothing, I capitulate in advance.

This gap between reality and its photo representation is a rabbit hole I cannot help slipping into. I’m mesmerized by my power to transform something normal, familiar to everyone’s eye — into something extraordinary, something no one, not even me, has ever seen before; into an eye wonder. Into something that simply didn’t exist before I first saw it.

It’s the sense of my humble wonderment over the camera’s ethereal powers that makes me keep experimenting with long exposure, surrealism in pictures, deconstructing common shapes and traits.

Using extremely long exposures I try to test the reality, I give it more time to manifest itself, to show up. I pretend that I turned away and got out of the room, and I leave my camera to spy for me — when I’m back it will tell me what was happening to the -real- when I didn’t witness it.

This wondrous trick the camera does with reality works for me as evidence of the divine and the mundane co-presence in our life. Can the artist ever get a larger reward than this sort of evidence?

BIO

Sveta Kaverina is a visual artist based in Amsterdam. Sveta’s artistic practice revolves around themes of memories in their unreliability; personal loss; vague national identity and lack of credibility the world can offer to a human being in general.

Working with these themes Sveta focuses on the half-mysterious nature of photography itself which transforms normal, everyday appearances into extraordinary, spiritual and eternal meanings.

Sveta predominantly works with long exposure, surrealism in pictures, deconstructing of common shapes and traits. She is especially fascinated with the dimensions these methods can contribute to portraiture.

All in all, Sveta searches for her artistic designation in reconsidering the role art plays when helping a human to live his ending life full of traumas and unforgivable misapprehensions.