As the covid pandemic rolled over the world, many of us found ourselves going back to basics and spending more time with our families.
Angelika started photographing her project in April 2020, while still in complete lockdown in South Africa. The original inspiration was the beautiful emotional healing and act of acceptance of the past that she witnessed between a mother and her adult daughter. Due to covid restrictions, once again, they found themselves living together and subsequently standing face to face with old unresolved problems. What was photographed, was never a staged or posed event, it was rather an ongoing meditation on the emotions and how they presented themselves inside the captured images. After documenting this very intimate and yet very common in many ways life story, the desire to look deeper into the same aspects of other mother/child connections grew. For Angelika this work was not just an observation of some distant external events in a life of a stranger, it all felt familiar and as an ongoing process of resolving her own trauma and wounds, hence she consistently states that these series are autobiographical. She started exploring the same “story” in more mother/child relationships, examining the impact it had on her own family life and on the one’s of her audience. Later the project expanded into documenting the relationship between father and children, and different dynamics within it.
According to Angelika, her project is not a groundbreaking story, and yet at least in her all life and the people she worked with, the understanding of the significance and value of connection to our family and how it shapes us for the rest of our life not only deepened significantly, but also created tangible results within the lives of people involved in this art project. To put it into Angelika’s words: “This work is shaping me, by changing my past and reconfiguring my future. I am continuously becoming a better child and a mother.”
Come sail away
I want to collide my Stillstand with fast Life I want to feel my tenderness away
I want to not care
but,
as if under spell,
I keep searching for you.
an old well-oiled exercise routine, repeated habitually until it became who I remember myself to be
/Holding onto my Gods/ for you I look
My Mother
the young, gentle YOU that crawled so deep under until it suffocated and died
ending my quest,
will cost me all seven seas and sky above /Gods too/
but the biggest loss,
the deepest grief I feel,
is parting from my Hope of ever seeing you
By Angelika Kollin 2020 (a poem for my mother)
About Angelika Kollin
Angelika Kollin is a 44 year old Estonian photographer currently based in Tampa, Florida. She is married, a mother of 3 daughters, and is in the process of getting her degree in Psychology.
She is self-taught and engages with her passion for photography and art as a tool of exploration of interhuman connections, intimacy, and/or the absence of such. Angelika has spent the last 8 years living in African countries (Ghana, Namibia, South Africa), where she explored the same topic in a variety of different cultures and economic conditions. More and more it strengthens her belief that despite many circumstances in life, the one thing that shapes us the most is our relationship with our parents. Through intense artistic evolution she has arrived at her current and ongoing project You Are My Mother/Father.
As the covid pandemic rolled over the world, many of us found ourself going back to basics and spending more times with our families.
Angelika started photographing her project in April,
while still in complete lockdown in South Africa, because she wanted to document beautiful emotional healing she witnessed
between a mother and her adult daughter. She started exploring same “story” in other mother/child connections, examining the impact it had on her own family life and on her audience. Later the project expanded into a logical progression and the relationship between father and children and different dynamics within it became the focus of exploration.
According to Angelika, her project is not a groundbreaking story, and yet at least in her all life and the people she worked with, the understanding of the significance and value of connection to our family and how it shapes us for the rest of our life not only deepened significantly, but also created tangible results within the lives of people involved in this art project. [Official Website]
