Individual residencies / Olot
VLADA KRASILNIKOVA
From Monday, 17 November 2025 to Monday, 24 November 2025
Bio
Professional photographer, photography teacher. Author of photographic courses. Member of the Union of Photographers of Russia. One of the top portrait photographers for actors in Moscow.
Vlada’s works were exhibited at I’mpressed in Taiga gallery/St. Petersburg, Self Publish Riga in The Mill/Riga, F Book Show in 72Gallery/Tokyo, Zine Jam in Mediamatic Fabriek/Amsterdam, Relapse of the private in NCCA/Moscow.
Apart from human portraits Vlada’s interest lies in spontaneous photography that balances on various improvisational structures, as well as street photography. Many of her personal artistic projects and coaching sessions for students build from her skills of being a professional and a playful researcher of photography at the same time.
Project
In their project at Olot Vlada will be collaborating with her fellow artist Lena Kholkina and local people. They will be inviting Olot residents to a photographic workshop that will playfully create a set of portraits, temporary sculptures and still-lives, as well gather stories from the local context. Vlada will be offering some photographic strategies to the workshop participants, so that the artists and the group may build a narrative for a larger story and, eventually, a book or a zine, from the visuals created during the workshop.
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.