The cult of success and personal growth, working in an always-connected environment, the virtualization of private life, the importunate and imposed needs to demonstrate our successes, both real or imaginary, in social networks—all these have made the boundaries between professional and private lives to blur, gradually displacing the modern person’s right to his or her personal space more and more is being pushed to the sidelines.
The desire to impress all our peers and virtual friends, compounded with the fear of committing personal failure, nowadays render us more vulnerable to various phobias. Fear as a form is often nothing but a form of expression of mental discomfort forming in response to the desire for social approval and simultaneously, the uncertainty of results, poses an obstacle to our ability to perform performance of an any actions.
Cockroaches is a reflection of my own insecurity and vulnerability to imaginary monsters. A red cockroach to me is closely linked to my childhood memories evoking a feeling of irrepressible disgust. This is a monstrous imagery of anxiety and vague phobias, shocking omnivorousness and vitality. Using the interiors of my flat and my own body, I reenact the painful condition, which overcomes me in the process of working on my plans. In going through creative expressions and challenging experiences, full of thoroughly exhausting internal monologues, I turn into an abominable cockroach. Close people who are close to me become the targets of my uncontrollable destructive forces, while my own body feels like an alien even to myself, turning into a hostile space.
The increasingly fast pace of life, and greater dependence on social networks and ‘likes’, exert a negative influence on people, myself included. So I decided to work with this theme, for which the main inspiration was Takeshi Kitano’s film Achilles and the Tortoise, where he argues about how important it is not to miss the real life while pursuing art. Franz Kafka’s story, “The Metamorphosis”, helped me to visualize the boundary conditions of internal transformations. This project on the one hand deals with how we transform ourselves in the view of others; on the other hand, this does not absolve us from the need to have a dialogue with ourselves and be responsible for our own actions.
About Ksenia Sidorova
Ksenia Sidorova (b. 1983) works with photography and other media based in Moscow, Russia. Studied photojournalism at the School of Visual Arts, Moscow, as well as post-documentary photography and art photography at the DocDocDoc School of Modern Photography and at the FotoDepartament, St Petersburg. Her personal projects are mainly focused on the behavioural aspects of the human personality that exists within the framework of mass culture and social stereotypes. She is a member of The Russian Union of Art Photographers. [Official Website]
