Alena Zabolotina, 2024
Measures: 16 x 22 cm
Pages: 78
Technique: Glue bound softcover with laminated cover, Paper 130 g MultiDesign Original HPI White
Pages: 78
Technique: Glue bound softcover with laminated cover, Paper 130 g MultiDesign Original HPI White
Edition: 12
This work is an intimate reflection on disappearance, transformation, and the desire to dissolve into the natural world. It is an exploration of the boundary between presence and absence, between being and vanishing.
I constantly fantasize about leaving.
I lie in the grass and become one with it.
I enter the water and dissolve.
I fall asleep and disappear into a dream.
I move through a forest clearing, merging with the soil, becoming the shadow of a tree.
I sink into the golden center of a flower and become nectar.
I follow the flow of rainwater into the depths of the city’s underground.
In these moments, I experience a quiet surrender—an escape from the self, a return to something vast and unknowable.
This project, active from 2022 to 2024, takes shape across multiple media—photography, photobooks, and fabric prints. The physicality of these formats allows the images to exist as both permanent and ephemeral, shifting and evolving within different spaces. A limited edition of photobooks offers a more intimate engagement with these themes, allowing viewers to carry a fragment of this experience with them.
All photographs in the project were taken on a phone and edited by me in a photo editor on my phone. The retouching process also actively reflects the involvement of fantasy and imitates the dissolution of my gaze in the objects in the photograph.
At its core, Fantasies of Leaving is about surrendering control—about letting go and becoming something beyond oneself. It is a meditation on mortality, on the beauty of vanishing, and on the quiet, inevitable return to the elements from which we came.
@alena_zabolotina