Anastasiia Litvinova

This series of symbolic doll-books is dedicated to memory and the mythologization of women’s experiences within a single family.

The project is based on the stories of several generations of women in my family — my mother’s sisters and the figure of my grandmother, who exists for me not as a real person but as a construct assembled from fragmented memories, retellings, and silences. This memory is not whole; it is contradictory, repetitive, and transmitted primarily through emotional patterns that can at times be completely contrasting.

Each doll represents a separate female figure and has a name, with the exception of the grandmother. Her anonymity emphasizes her role not as an individual character but as a dominant maternal structure—a source of both order and chaos, discipline and emotional absence. Visually, she appears as a white figure dressed in black, referencing her way of life, which could be described as that of a “nun in the world.”

Each doll carries symbolic attributes that reflect essential characteristics of the person it represents, including fragments of the hair of those individuals.

Color in the project performs a structural function. White, terracotta, and black form a scale of generations and emotional distance from the maternal figure. The older sisters have fragments of dark fabric incorporated into their clothing, indicating the direct influence of this figure on their life experiences, while the color of their “bodies” remains entirely different from that of the mother. White closes the scale, appearing both in the figure of the mother and in the image of the youngest sister, forming a closed circle.

In this project, I take on the role of an unreliable narrator, constructing interpretations and emphasizing the impossibility of accurately reconstructing family history.

Memory — especially someone else’s memory — inevitably breaks into fragments, where symbols and stories, over time, condense and gradually transform into myth.