Nice to meet you

I am 20 years old and have no idea how to live this life. To make the search easier, I needed someone who had already lived through this age. I wanted to ask for a precise description of the experience and some practical advice. And who knows better how to live “properly” than a mother?

I have gathered all the information about my mom in her youth: appearance, hobbies, relationships with her sister, best friend, men. And then we were compared. Her twenties: 1994 in the small Russian town of Raduzhny, bleached hair with hydroperites, clothes rarely sold on the market, casual parties, already married. My 20s: 2020 in St. Petersburg, without cosmetics, clothes from the mass market, homebody, single. It seemed like we were completely different women at the same age. So, I decided to find something in common.

I tried to live my young mother’s life and then showed her my own. Our youths intertwined, we looked into each other’s epoch. I was quite ironic about the life of a woman in the 1990s, and her advice in the reality of the 2020s was strange. While working on the series, I had the feeling that I had met my mother for the first time and was getting closer to her. I think my mom felt it too, although she was telling me to stop wasting my time.

Sasha Kotsyuruba is based in Saint Petersburg, Russia and currently is a student at the Fotografika academy.