Ornament after tradition

Ornament after Tradition is a research-based project about three generations of women in emigration and their attempts to preserve, translate, and reinvent their Pomor culture after a break in direct transmission. At the centre of the project is the Lydia's Archive: a fragile family archive of patterns, memories, letters, textile fragments, oral stories, and speculative documents connected to women who carry Pomor heritage across different places, languages, and historical ruptures.

The project looks at ornament not as a stable ethnic sign, but as a living language that can be damaged, forgotten, misread, repaired, and continued. For these women, traditional forms are not simply inherited. They have to be searched for, reconstructed, guessed, mistranslated, and sometimes invented again. In emigration, culture becomes both a burden and a tool: something that risks turning into nostalgia, but also something that can help build continuity where official history, family memory, and everyday life have been interrupted.

The three generations in the project relate to Pomor culture differently. One generation remembers it as lived practice; another receives it through fragments, silence, and loss; the youngest generation encounters it almost as an archive, a code, or a set of signs that must be learned from a distance. Through them, the project asks what remains of a culture when its natural environment, language, rituals, and community structures are no longer fully accessible.

The project combines historical research, fictional reconstruction, visual material, and performative narration. It will be presented in the form of a book and a performance. The book will gather the Lydia Archive, ornamental studies, textual fragments, and speculative documentation, while the performance will activate the archive through voice, gesture, storytelling, and the unstable presence of inherited forms in the present. The project is ongoing and will be updated later.