Individual residencies / Olot
LENA KHOLKINA
From Monday, 17 November 2025 to Monday, 24 November 2025
Bio
Graduate of the Institute of Contemporary Art founded by Joseph Backstein. Resident of Winzavod Open studios 2023/24, ZIL Cultural centre 2023, KOSMOST 2018 and ZIL Cultural Centre 2016. Recipient of the Urban Urge Seed Grant 2014 and winner of Rock your dummy 2013 photobook contest.
Lena is visual artist, choreographer and independent publisher. She works with photography, video, objects, movement and book format. Her topics today are non-existent worlds, reinvention of things, escape from everyday life, dreams.
Lena is interested in a book as a physical object, a way of communication, a future scenario, an opportunity to slow down an a bridge connecting people, allowing them to see something new or see it in a new way; immerse yourself in the reality created by the author through a combination of paper, format, binding, cover, paper, font, text, type of printing, etc.
Project
In their project at Olot Lena will be collaborating with her fellow artist Vlada Krasilnikova and local people. Together they will focus on reinventing details of Olot area and create new imagery working with small local objects available, including forest, stone or water items, as well as personal items of Olot residents, to build temporary sculptures. They will also be gathering stories to intertwine with images, as well as sounds.
Lena and Vlada would like to invite local people to engage in the project, so they will be offering a program of events like artist talks, photoshoots and making a book dummy workshop.
Songs of extinct volcanoes
Extinct is lost, gone forever. There is an idea of a loss, and we grieve a loss, there’s a sense of nostalgia around it. The world is collapsing, it’s changing completely, and some things will be gone forever very soon or maybe they are already gone. Like volcanoes in Garrotxa.
Extinct is also about evolution, about envisaging something new. It’s brings transformation, rebirth, growth on top of something that is gone forever.
Our idea for the collaborative workshop is of a garden - an imaginary garden, a skeleton of something lost, and a future garden on top of it. A place where new things start to grow. An imaginary garden is an escapist idea - a place we want to hide in and plunge into nostalgia. A skeleton, on top of which something else starts to grow, yet unknown, but soon to be. It’s also a glance from the future - a scenario of the future, a growing possibility, an anticipation of the new.
The book object that we created with all the photos taken - both from the students and ourselves - it's a book/sculpture that is cut in a particular way to remind of a mountain. The object can be seen as a sculpture - static - or as a more traditional book, as it is bound at one end with a thread and can be paged through as a regular book, and individual images can be seen inside. We accompany the book object/sculpture with a zine that documents several layers of the photographs that it contains - those are photos by the students telling personal stories of a young generation of Olot, images from the Archive - telling stories of the past, and images we took and manipulated during our stay.
The residence provided a very fruitful and fulfilling time for us on many levels. It's the combination of artistic work, rest and wonderful fresh air that creates the magic of the days where we could work and feel inspired every day. We thank Faberllull for this experience from the heart.
