Alya Esipovich

Sandbox

Adults imagine, that the world of childhood is surrounded by the cheerful feelings and sweet memories. Girls who look like angels, good-natured toys and filled with the best intentions older friends. That’s not true. In the childhood there is milk with skin, cruel kids from the neighbor yard and vindictive girls with dolls dressed in pink, who live the next door. Photograph series «Sandbox» of Alya Esipovich is meant to show, that childhood is actually ugly. It’s a disaster, which is impossible to handle. You can only survive it and forget about it. That’s why the scariest thing that can happen to a person — it’s to stay in this time forever. To be small means to stay thrown out of the circle of the common life. In this meaning adults are just like children, left to their own devices: they will never forgive somebody’s weakness or somebody’s trouble. And childhood is a horrible phantom, which disappears with time, fortunately, for the majority of the people. «Sandbox» of Alya Esipovich is also about other things. It shows, that we, after having found ourselves in adult life, stay unprotected. We stay the same kids, who didn’t learn to win in games with your friends, to pull yourself up dexterously on the horizontal bar and to win in the fight for life in the exclusive circle of the yard. Adult life turns out to be a fraud too: we still stay vulnerable. But, may be, exactly this incapacity for the resistance makes us people. Those, who we wanted to become in our childhood, when we pretended to be cosmonauts and sailors — strong and fair — real heroes. Time passes through the fingers, like the sand from the sandbox.

Mother will not come. Ever.

Ekaterina Vasilieva