The work on a project about the Chechen poet Arbi Mamakaev began with my trip to a residency in the North Caucasus. At first, I was searching for information about him online, but it yielded very few results. I was able to become acquainted with his biography in the local history museum of the village of Nadterechnoye (Chechen Republic), which was created by Arbi’s son, Eduard, in honor of his father. That is how I learned that the poet’s biography is the story of a person who lived through a difficult time of upheaval.

He was born in 1918 in the Chechen-Ingush ASSR, in the village of Nadterechnoye. After his father’s death, he ended up in an orphanage. Later he entered a workers’ faculty and then worked for a newspaper. Arbi’s first poems were published in 1934, and his first collection was released in 1941. Thanks to his successful participation in a announcers’ competition, he began working in radio. Until 1941, his life unfolded successfully—his contemporaries called him “a darling of fate” and “the Chechen Yesenin.” But in 1941, Arbi was arrested on a denunciation and then exiled to Magadan, where he remained until 1956.

For those 15 years, the poet did not write a single line. In 1957, he was rehabilitated and returned home. And just a year later, in 1958, he died, not having lived to the age of 40.

I also explored a more personal part of his biography by studying his letters to his son and his second wife Maya, as well as documents and objects that accompanied him during those terrible 15 years. The museum also preserves manuscripts of poems and epics written by Arbi before and after the camp period.

Thus, all information about Arbi was concentrated in a memorial museum that functioned as a space for preserving and reproducing the memory of the poet according to a single narrative script. The traces left by Arbi are embedded in material objects, and it is through them that the process of recognizing him takes place.

This led me to reflect on my own digital identity—dynamic and vulnerable to rewriting. I tried to reproduce the logic of how a digital trace is formed, which would one day become the basis of my biographical narrative.

This project is a reflection on ways of remembering, preserving, and reproducing events—then, before the digital era, and now. It considers what media of memory we can rely on if material ones are not stable over time, and digital ones are unreliable. During the exhibition of this project, Arbi Mamakaev acquired his own digital trace, now intertwined with mine.

Book size 19×27 cm

96 pages

Open binding

Each book is entirely assembled by hand