The first “robot” series I ever did, while a student at Concordia University.

It started as a memory, as a slightly traumatized joke.

In the summer of 2007 I worked for a Literary Seminar in St. Petersburg. The courses were in English, but as soon as I walked out of the classrooms of the Herzen University Pedagogical institute blackly humorous materialism, or cynicism, or ironic gloom seemed to hang in the air. The whole thing was heightened by the constant summer daylight of the white nights.

Brought up with leftist-Latin-American utopic notions about Cold-war Communism, the heaps of still-cheap soviet-era souvenirs evoked something a little different for me than for most tourists crowding the city that summer. I found myself experiencing an improbable (and probably off-target) deja vu as I wandered the streets and suburbs. Everything, (on a vastly grander scale) connected me to the tired propaganda of my childhood…

That summer also crystallized my sense of having spent my life watching events unfold from the edge of the world.