ADMA 2025-2026

You, me and clowns between us

A year ago, my parents created a number of clown puppets that made their journey from home to join us with my brother and sister. Today, we siblings are scattered in different places and clowns between us act as a tender reminder of the choice between the desire for freedom and the longing for home.

How can an autofictional play with puppets help me to unfold and activate narratives about migration, the state of loneliness, the desire for freedom, and the longing for home. How can human & puppet siblings together generate imaginative yet real stories, that otherwise couldn’t be told, and bonds, that couldn’t be made? And, at the same time, how can this play help to protect these stories and bonds?

My research starts with the story of those clowns. Given a collective birth by the caring hands of my Mom, Dad, and Grandmother, the clowns embarked on their journey towards us with my brother and sister, who also moved away from home a few years ago. Packed in a blue suitcase, they successfully crossed the border without being stopped by guards (thank god, no one asks for a puppet’s passport!) and arrived at their destinations. Some of the puppets finally reached me here in Belgium. Being away and missing my siblings, I slowly started imagining the puppets as my non-blood siblings too. In our new world, the clowns whistle songs, twirl curls around their fingers, and dangle their feet in fashionable shoes, perhaps whispering and giggling about something, while I make toast with fried eggs, sauerkraut, and tabasco for breakfast. Very often, we share our memories of home with each other.

Myself, having moved from Moscow to Antwerp five years ago, I found it quite challenging to have a balance between attempts at grounding myself in a new place and the continuous longing for home. Moving places solely in the intensity of the war reinforced the state of loneliness and alienation both in my life and my practice. After years of heavy juxtaposition, the constant separation between “here” and “there” and the need to always choose one or another, I realised I had framed myself as someone that I do not necessarily belong to, just in order to be understood in a new context (1). Very often, if I made a political work in the context of Belgium, it was difficult for me to imagine it being shared in Russia (and here I am not even talking about censorship and safety reasons), but about my own fractured positionality. It is still a challenge for me to weave my experiences together in one complex and entangled structure without reducing or flattening it, but having the clowns close by my side helps me to reflect on this and rethink this together, connecting separate dots into lines, circles, and shapes:

At first I thought I was a mermaid. But now I wish to be more like an octopus. Instead of breaking relations, I want to stretch them into bridges. We need to grow tentacles and this is kind of urgent. (2)

Growing invisible tentacles is one of my main methodologies. Basically, in my practice, I call it “collaging”. In my work, collage equals magic: it brings together, holds close, helps us to travel, through time and distance, gives freedom, and walks me home. Collage for me becomes an autofictional space where the play between my family, the clowns, our past, and sacred dreams, can take place for real and at the exact same moment.

In my research I am collaging the story of the puppets with our home and family archive, recreating a fictional world where we can stay closer. It is fascinating to see how through different clown—human generations the stories circulate, pass, and come back again. I cannot stop thinking of how one of the puppets resembles our Great- Grandmother, who passed away a few years ago and now possibly stays with us, being far away from her initial home.

While travelling and crossing borders have become challenging for my family, the clowns keep on reinforcing our connections and showing us that in fact we stay much closer than we think. That’s why you, me and clowns between us aims to replay, recollect, reclaim, and, of course, re-member us being together. And the more I play with them, the more I believe in it.

At the same time, while inviting my family into this world and making this tender play real, I also feel a strong urge to find ways to protect its fragility and intimacy. How can I share these moments of intimacy with others? How can I make the process of sharing a part of this play? For now I remain with these questions while developing and experimenting with a methodology of showing and manifesting this intimacy without exposing it. Out of fear of exposure, some of the steps I took in this research felt deeply isolating, and at times, even lonely. And yet, the project became a reminder that playing together is always so much more fun than playing alone.

In the beginning of this research, I thought that us, human siblings, would activate the clowns by animating them and playing with them. However, being stuck with the discomfort of a “puppeteer” position and searching for alternative ways of interacting with them, I realised that it was not necessarily us who activated the clown puppets to tell stories. Instead, it was also them who generated this play between us and revived these connections in the autofictional dimension. Moreover, while we all are trying to root ourselves in new landscapes, clowns help us to reclaim the idea of home that we came from and remain the kids that we once and forever were. At least for our parents.

Our dad has always wished for us to have the freedom to move. But the more time passes, the more I realise the price of this freedom, while not being able to return home.

Image 1 — Mom showing our photos that she keeps in her purse. August 2021

Image 2 — Duo. April 2026

Image 3 — In the living room. Recently.

Footnotes:

1- Glissant, É. (1997). For O pacity. Poetics of relation (B. Wing, Trans.). University of Michigan Press.

2- Haraway, D. J. (2016). Tentacular thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press.