About the project
Lucid Plexus is a study of forms of historical memory, through the lens of collective remembrance, personal testimony, and intergenerational narrative. Anchored in the experience of the Ingrian Finns — an ethnic minority inhabiting Russian territories since the 17th century — it traces a lineage shaped by displacement, captivity, war, and systemic scarcity.
At its core, the project poses a fundamental question: how do we live with memory today? Should it be safeguarded in its static form, or allowed to weave itself into the living fabric of the now — unfolding, and vital, a form of evolving knowledge? The work proposes memory not as a sealed archive but as a dynamic, embodied knowledge — restless, intimate, and active.
Turning toward marginal and suppressed histories, Lucid Plexus approaches everyday objects as vessels of memory — silent witnesses to personal and collective experience. Here, art and artistic practice do not serve merely as instruments of preservation or musealization, but rather as means of attentive encounter with the past — acts of reactivation that illuminate obscured narratives into presence. In resistance to official narratives and their mechanisms of erasure, the project seeks to construct spaces where memory can remain unfinished, alive, and in motion.
On the eve of the 1917 Revolution, Alexander Grin wrote, ‘And the future seems to have stopped standing in its proper place.’ Now, a hundred years later, the future is, once again, not where it ought to be. Our time comes to us second‐hand.
Postmemory’ describes the relationship that the ‘generation after’ bears to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma of those who came before – to experiences they ‘remember’ only by means of the stories, images, and behaviors among which they grew up. But these experiences were transmitted to them so deeply and affectively as to seem to constitute memories in their own right. Postmemory’s connection to the past is thus actually mediated not by recall but by imaginative investment, projection and creation.
Lucid Plexus adopts slow modes of movement as its core methodology — cycling expeditions, walking routes, and situated fieldwork woven through the Nordic-Baltic region, a landscape carrying the memory of a wandering fate of those fleeing WWII, post-war repressions, persecution, deportation, persecution, deportation and labour camps. These practices are not merely logistical, but epistemological: a way of thinking through terrain, of tracing memory with the body.
Stitching emerges both as metaphor and as method. From embroidery to rock climbing, artists engage in acts of binding, mending, and holding — gestures that echo across scales, from the intimate to the topographical. Walking and stitching become twin forms of cartography and embodiment: ways of mapping through presence, of inhabiting histories through somatic experience.
Manual, tactile practices — carving, embroidery, mold-making — also serve as tools of engagement. These acts slow time, draw attention, and reorient perception from the visual toward the haptic — from the image to the touch.
Routes are composed in relation to sites layered with historical residue: former camps, partisan trails, military fortifications, and refugee encampments along the Baltic coast. These are not simply destinations, but active participants in the project’s unfolding logic of return, reweaving, and reactivation.
Project route 2025-2028
Finland - Lapland, Rovaniemi, Ivalo, Arctic Ocean Highway Norway - Finnmark, Kirkenes, Svaehold labour camp Hammerfest, Tjotta War Cemetery, Oslo
Sweden - Helsingborg, Umeå, Gotland, Rejmyre
Estonia - Narva, Hiiumaa, Tartu, Pärnu Latvia - Riga, Mazirbe Boat Cemetery, Lithuania - Nida colony, Vilnius prison
