The fall of USSR, Chernobyl and my first years at school as a restless bookworm with the attention span of a mosquito.
Surviving the 80s is a literary and archival project that uses obsolete media technologies and historical events as a framework for telling personal stories. As formats become obsolete, disappear, or can no longer be read, they mirror the ways memories fade, persist, and are reconstructed over time.
Structured chronologically, the book follows a life from childhood in the 1980s through the early 2000s. Each chapter is anchored in a different technology or historical event, pairing autobiographical narratives with archival photographs and cultural fragments from the period.
Part memoir, part media archaeology, Surviving the 80s explores the intersection of personal history and technological history. It is interested in what remains after a medium becomes obsolete, and how stories continue to survive long after the devices that once carried them have fallen silent.
Structured chronologically, the book follows a life from childhood in the 1980s through the early 2000s. Each chapter is anchored in a different technology or historical event, pairing autobiographical narratives with archival photographs and cultural fragments from the period.
Part memoir, part media archaeology, Surviving the 80s explores the intersection of personal history and technological history. It is interested in what remains after a medium becomes obsolete, and how stories continue to survive long after the devices that once carried them have fallen silent.
*80 books were printed at Sleep on it Press in RISO (black+fluor yellow) as a part of a limited edition series. If you wish to obtain a copy of the book you can pre-order the second edition from here.
I spent most of my childhood feeling like an adult trapped in a child’s body. I can vividly remember the terror I felt when I was five and a half years old in the courtyard of my elementary school looking around at my peers. They are all children, I thought with profound horror; they have no idea of life, they just follow a ball or they jump up and down and they keep coming every morning to this horrible grey jail like sheep!
In my defense, my school building looked like an actual jail building. I looked right and left and quickly left the courtyard. The depressing building had no colors, no drawings were hanging on the dirty walls but just faded yellowish maps with USSR posing still intact taking over the two-thirds of the map. The large corridors where dim-lit with flickering halogen tubes and the bathrooms smelled of urine and bleach.
