Olga Rakova — Multidisciplinary artist and educator

Born in 1984 in Volgograd. Lives and works in Volgograd. A multidisciplinary artist and educator, she practices collage and collage animation, creates digital graphics, installations, AR, and objects, and works with archives and found materials. Areas of interest: self-awareness, cultural anthropology, the human image in the phygital space, femininity, corporeality, the search for personal identity, the mechanisms of autobiographical memory, and the integration of trauma.

For her, memory is the substrate of identity. She draws on her experience as an archaeologist when working with personal archives and with fragments that carry other people’s stories: old photographs, vintage printed images, broken jewellery, drying cases. Collage becomes both a central method and a mode of research through which she seeks to reveal identity as unstable and multiple.

Working with fragments is her way of making sense of the whole: memory, femininity, body image, and Home, understood as a structure continually reassembled, where traces of personal and cultural artefacts form temporary connections. Within these shifting constellations, she creates fields of interaction between what is disintegrating and what is being retained. Heterogeneous elements gather into a shaky, tense wholeness.

In her practice, she attends to how physical, mental, and digital spaces coexist within a phygital reality. As she explores the mechanisms of memory and personal remembrance, she often moves objects that are decaying, or already lost, in the material world from the terrain of “fading” memory, a space in which recollection is irreversibly rewritten, into XR. From there, these objects can return from the digital realm and re-enter the material world as artworks. Her work becomes a way of registering destruction and loss, while also opening the possibility of rebuilding forms of presence in which identity is understood as a dynamic unity.

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