Series of collages created from documentary and contemporary footage, combining Polaroid photographs of Paris with archival family photos.

 

The project explores Daria Panteleeva’s relationship with Paris and her mother’s love for this city, for France, and for French culture — a love that was passed on to the artist from childhood. It is a story of a mother’s dream fulfilled through her daughter’s life, and of how, twenty years after her mother’s death, Daria continues to feel her presence in the city her mother adored — a city Daria herself has now fallen in love with.

 

At the same time, the project reflects on the diplomatic and cultural ties between the USSR and France established after Charles de Gaulle’s visit to the Soviet Union in 1966. It examines how these relations influenced the worldview of Soviet citizens, shaped their perception of French culture in the second half of the 20th century, and contributed to the spread of communist ideas within the French intellectual milieu.

 

“The idea for the project was born during a conversation with a Frenchman about Patricia Kaas. I told him she had been my mother’s favorite singer, and he replied that his mother adored her too. That’s when I realized that being in Paris made me feel at home — everything seemed familiar and close to my heart.”

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The artist’s move to Paris coincided with the realization that twenty years had passed since her mother’s death. Her mother had dreamed of seeing this city but never had the chance. Daria, having left Russia for Germany and later moved to France, found that Paris had become a place of their imaginary reunion.

 

The project interweaves personal memory, family history, and the cultural history of two nations. Through visual and emotional parallels between past and present, the artist explores how French culture permeated Soviet reality — through books, cinema, music, style, and aesthetics — and how this influence shaped the identity of women of her generation.

 

At the heart of the visual narrative are new Polaroid photographs of Paris taken by Daria and archival images of her mother, found by a close family friend and brought from Russia. This creates a dialogue across time and space: a daughter “showing” her mother the Paris she never saw, speaking to her in thought, walking through streets where reality intertwines with memory.

 

The project becomes an exploration of the cultural interplay between France and Russia, and a reflection on how politics invades private life and individual destinies. In the context of war and exile, this dialogue with the past helps the artist to reconsider her own identity and to trace the deep interconnection between the personal and the political, between history and memory.

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