In the research area of Irek Shamanaev, the collective body of the community and its connection with the flesh of the forest. Memories of trauma are somewhere between memory and knowledge, something that determines our perception of the present. It seems that working with the topic of post-memory is an important request that has been going on since the 2010s. Large projects by Pavel Otdelnov, Chaim Sokol, and “Bakal” by Anastasia Bogomolova are devoted to this topic. Mecan muštond Shamanova watches how faces dissolve in the forest, a fear that we could not witness ourselves, but which is so easily reproduced. Quiet, shut up, they know better from above. 

Maria Morina, interdisciplinary artist and curator.

Mecan muštond 

(Memory of the Forest)

Collective memory and the human trace in time, recorded by the forest.

Collective memory is viewed through the metaphor of the forest — a living organism that preserves the imprints of human history. The forest exists beyond the human scale of time: trees live for centuries, and the fungal mycelium connects them into a single system of exchange and memory.

The series of photographs employs projections made with a handmade impulse projector: archival images and portraits of people are cast onto tree trunks and canopies. These projections become visible manifestations of the connection between the human and natural layers of memory. The forest is not a backdrop but a witness, its texture inscribed with traces of human presence — language, ritual, war, fear.

Here, memory unfolds as an ecosystem: not linear but networked, where the past does not vanish but dissolves into the environment. The disappearance of language, the loss of spirits, and the traumatic experience of history become part of a natural archive — part of what the forest remembers.

The Forest still remembers.