The Girl Nothing Happens To is a portrait series dedicated to Alisa Selezneva, a teenage character from popular Soviet science fiction. Within the series of watercolour drawings, I reflect upon female girlhood, generational trauma, collective
identity and memory.
In novels and films, Alisa lives in the 2080s and embodies the image the "happy Soviet future": being independent and innocent, intellectual but strong, she speaks many languages perfectly and conducts her own scientific research. Just by chance, she travels back to Moscow in the 1980s by a time machine.
The first published novel was titled “The Girl Nothing Happens To”. What could have happened to a twelve-year-old girl setting off back in time without adults? Was she safe there in the 80s? Was she bullied or assaulted? After all, every fourth girl in Russia experiences harassment even now. Or did she find herself stuck in time due to a lack of a future?
With every new drawing, I interpret the face of Alisa Selezneva anew, juxtaposing it with my teenage ID photo. Thus, the series develops as a group self-portrait, a memorial of my generation of girls who experienced profound political and
social transitions.
The series was exhibited in the Cultural Centre ZIL, an educational and entertainment centre for children. Ninety-six portraits were installed as a frieze in the ex-canteen.
As I ground my practice on takes and repeated interpretations, I repeatedly reproduced the portrait of Alisa on small sheets. The size of the paper was defined by the limitations of my workplace during the COVID lockdown in 2020. After 40 drawings, I accidentally found my first international passport with the contemporary Russian stamp, but the passport’s cover was USSR. In the photo, I am the same age as Alisa in the film a,nd I have the same hairstyle as hers. Thus, the series unexpectedly became much more personal than I had initially assumed - a paradoxical group self-portrait, a memorial of me and those girls I knew and did not know, with whom something had [not] happened.
