“…so I built myself a nest, one I can carry. In fact, my first “nest” was the small backpack I took with me on the first day of the war — a few things that suddenly became my whole life. They are still with me, quiet objects that turned into home, into an anchor, into my readiness to move again. I wanted to make this metaphor real, to weave an actual nest and turn it into a backpack. It is heavy, almost ten kilos, made of branches and sticks that press against my shoulders. Fragile and awkward, not comfortable to wear, just as emigration is not comfortable, just as the feeling of living with the knowledge that in my actual home there is always war. And still, I cannot simply take this nest off — it stays with me, like the experience itself. In these photos you see the documentation of a performance where I spend hours each day with the nest on my back, doing ordinary things in Neuss, the city where I have been living since the beginning of the full-scale invasion. This work is about home as I know it now — no longer a fixed place, no longer material things, but something I always carry with me. A home that has shifted into movement, into readiness, into memories and people, into the weight of what I cannot put down, and into the freedom to continue.”
Aglaya Nogina, Anna Lunghini, Düsseldorf, 2025