Juli Susin. Chronos-Swimmer

Juli Susin began an ongoing photo journal in 1980, documenting the traces of geographical, emotional, familial, and artistic ruptures. These range from the scars of the USSR’s “Great Experiment” and his time in the Berlin-Tegel transit camp in the early 1980s, to his global experiences across France, Eastern Europe, Los Angeles, Iceland, and Paraguay within the Royal Book Lodge network, and finally to contemporary questions regarding the destruction and erasure of memory. Chronos-Swimmer is a crypto-biography that delves into a psychic landscape where time and space are governed by the logic of traumatic memory. His photographs—often staged or altered through chemical manipulation—are both an expression of a search and evidence of events that are simultaneously real and fictional.
Juli Susin began an ongoing photo journal in 1980, documenting the traces of geographical, emotional, familial, and artistic ruptures. These range from the scars of the USSR’s “Great Experiment” and his time in the Berlin-Tegel transit camp in the early 1980s, to his global experiences across France, Eastern Europe, Los Angeles, Iceland, and Paraguay within the Royal Book Lodge network, and finally to contemporary questions regarding the destruction and erasure of memory. Chronos-Swimmer is a crypto-biography that delves into a psychic landscape where time and space are governed by the logic of traumatic memory. His photographs—often staged or altered through chemical manipulation—are both an expression of a search and evidence of events that are simultaneously real and fictional. The artistic practice of Juli Susin (b. 1966, Moscow, USSR) spans a wide spectrum, including photography, drawing, sculpture, film, and artists' books. In the 1990s, together with Veronique Bourgoin, he co-founded an international platform centered on artists' books, now known as Royal Book Lodge. Susin lives and works in Montreuil and Albisola.