Yulia Fernandes - Crossing borders, 2024

This photographic project traces a personal and politically loaded journey across 4,700 kilometres and seven countries, exploring the layered relationship between movement, attachment, and the artist’s enduring connection to a Russian car. The vehicle operates simultaneously as a symbol of liberation and confinement, anchoring the narrative in a world where freedom is mediated by shifting geopolitical forces.

Compelled by sanctions to drive the car out of Europe, the artist turns to self-portraiture as a method of experimentation and self-examination. Drawing from avant-garde traditions, the work uses the road, borders, and interpersonal relationships as reflective tools for accessing the interior self. What emerges is a striking portrait of strength, vulnerability, and the psychological dimensions of displacement.

This is a project that speaks to the broader impact of political structures on the intimate and everyday. The journey becomes a metaphor for transition - moments of closeness interrupted by the harsh realities of political, physical, and emotional separation. The recurring demands of documentation, permissions, and insurance foreground the way bureaucracy not only divides land but disrupts human connection. Each pause along the route, whether serene or uneasy, becomes a site of contemplation, pointing to the persistent sense of fragmentation that follows in the wake of imposed borders.