FAMILY VALUES

 

Olfactory objects and interactive installation, 2018

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Family Values is a personal exploration of the historical moment when Jewish identity in the Russian Empire took on the fixed form of a surname. Until the late eighteenth century, Jews generally did not use hereditary family names; belonging was defined by community, lineage, and craft. Beginning in the 1790s and increasingly through the first half of the nineteenth century, imperial reforms required Jews to adopt permanent surnames. Many of these names were assigned according to professions. The sensorial world of labour – with its materials, gestures, and especially its smells – thus became the foundation of future family memory.

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Each object becomes a micro-archive. It offers a way to approach history through tactile and olfactory traces rather than through written documents. Scent functions not as illustration but as a medium of remembering. It opens access to what was never recorded and evokes the material world from which names once originated. These boxes act as miniature reliquaries of memory, where scent becomes a bridge between the lived reality of work and the identity that once crystallised from it. Through them, I reflect on how family histories are constructed – not only through language or documents, but through materials, gestures, labour, and the invisible traces that linger in smell.

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Each box carries a symbolic drawing on its surface. The image serves as a visual riddle that invites the viewer to guess the profession from which a family name once emerged. Inside the box, objects linked to that trade are placed together with olfactory compositions that reconstruct its atmosphere. These scents evoke the warm aroma of soap for soap makers, the smell of bread and grain for millers and bakers, the deep leathery note recalling tanners, and many others.

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Family Values weaves together visual riddles, material fragments, and smell as a carrier of memory. The project transforms the formation of surnames into an intimate sensorial encounter in which the past reveals itself gradually, much like the slow emergence of the names reimagined in this work.

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Publications about project:

2022 “Artist of the world Lisa Stormit”, Contemporary art magazine Artmusemagazine.com, № 12’ 2022, p. 56-61. Russia

2020 “The energy of art: why you should go to Moscow's first blazar art fair”, ART FLASH Magazine, Russia

2019 “Open Studios. Season Two”, Winzavod Center for Contemporary Art, Russia