About Sasha Samarina

Sasha Samarina is a 22-year-old multimedia artist and poet currently based out of Calgary. As a Russian native, Sasha’s art primarily focuses on the experience of growing up in a politically unstable country, the resulting immigration and the unsavoury feelings of guilt and shame for leaving one’s family and friends behind. She also explores the ideas of collective responsibility and guilt.

Artist’s statement

‘Vesuvius’ is a meditation on the extent of personal and collective responsibility in the face of large-scale cataclysms – be those natural or man-made. Each of the four spaces presented in the video asks a certain question about the feeling one experiences in that space in relation to a catastrophe. Near the landmark Calgary location, the viewer is asked to reconcile the seeming lack of danger in the frame and the uncanny valley feeling of the collage. When faced with the soon-to-erupt mountain Vesuvius, what should the people of Pompeii have done? What, if anything, can the protesters in Saint Petersburg ask of the deity watching them? Why had the same, or maybe a different deity, done nothing to prevent the destruction of the city it now gazes over?