Aging (2011)

It is a project in progress about my grandmother. It has been shouted about 2 years. Her name is Nadezda, she is 87 and she lives with us.

She feels disgust towards her changed physiology, infirm body and illnesses. She has desire to love and to be loved – and at the same time she feels being unworthy of it. She constantly feels being offended because she thinks that people have the laugh of her, because her weakness (almost blind and deaf). Sometimes she tells that she hates herself.

She is angry and tells my mother and me: “You don’t give me a keys, I can’t go outside!”. But in fact she knows that she can’t go alone without us because of her health.

Things substitute the needed love from people around – she doesn’t throw away anything. She believes in a “miracle” and that different gadgets can help her recover health, youth and so on.

I can understand her feelings, don’t feel anything in common with young people. Youth means energy, ardor, force, fearlessness, rashness. Elderly and middle-aged people are more serious, appreciate life and health more. They understand that life is very short. They have been disappointed, lost their belief, suffered a lot, but they still do believe – it gives them force to live and survive.

Generation of middle-aged and elderly people in Russia has a depression because of social conditions, loss of belief.

I feel more in common with these people, I understand them better, than young people. It happens so, that in childhood I got ill and this influenced whole my life. I stayed in hospital for a long time and my life has changed after that upside down. I was forbidden to run, jump, go to school, I had to lie in the bed for long time, being home or at hospital. After that I didn’t have an option of playing with person of the same age. I have been spending all the time with my family and especially with my Granny. The problems of my relatives become clear to me, compared to those of young people, I considered their problems stupid.

I often feel myself old. And in this story I try to talk about topics which are important for me also.