How can memory be reconciled with absence and change?

How can we approach memory of the familiar from the past superimposed with new memories?

What happens when the placeholders to which memory is indexed are missing or moved?

The artist’s experience returning to Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) after almost forty years of absence – in search of Soviet monuments long since removed and discovering they still exist however altered in collective memory.

How is Lenin appropriated in nostalgia – how is that nostalgia collective and what can we learn from that about collective memory of the Soviet?

These are some of the questions that are driving my research and writing.