Such people are impossible to overlook. One wants to be near them; they emit a relict radiance, and life fills with long-cast meaning. They are descendants of time, in whom duration itself becomes palpable. They carry through time the form of the presence of knowledge, passing it on like an Olympic flame. Intelligentsia is understood differently across cultures: in some, it denotes education; in others, moral and spiritual depth; elsewhere, cultural and social function. Yet a certain universality emerges, showing that the ability to retain and transmit meaning is the result of prolonged accumulation of experience.

Having lived in America for nearly thirty years, I have observed a culture unfamiliar to me — that of African Americans — and in this project I filter it through the lens of Slavic intelligentsia, exploring how it manifests visually and through the pixel language, where the face becomes a structural form stripped of private details, and relict radiance emerges almost mathematically.