I don't know where I am.

There is nothing around except the sky and the dug soil.

Where do I go among the infinity of destinations?

I don't know how I got here.

Did I leave home to enter the road? Or am I on the road in search of home?

I don't know what is going to happen to me.

Will I be going, or will I come somewhere, or fall dead.

I hold my flag tightly in my hand.

I know nothing.

Except that when I get tired of going

I will stop and rise my flag above the horizon, above the sky and ground.

I will know then that now these are my sky and my ground, and it is my home,

because I brought it with me.

And wherever I go I will carry it with me.

The flag will fly, along with the infinity of destinations.

I still won't know where I am.

But I will always be home.

I don't know where I am.

There is nothing around except the sky and the dug soil.

Where do I go among the infinity of destinations?

I don't know how I got here.

Did I leave home to enter the road? Or am I on the road in search of home?

I don't know what is going to happen to me.

Will I be going, or will I come somewhere, or fall dead.

I hold my flag tightly in my hand.

I know nothing.

Except that when I get tired of going

I will stop and rise my flag above the horizon, above the sky and ground.

I will know then that now these are my sky and my ground, and it is my home,

because I brought it with me.

And wherever I go I will carry it with me.

The flag will fly, along with the infinity of destinations.

I still won't know where I am.

But I will always be home.

I Don't Know Where I Am, But It Is My Home

“I Don’t Know Where I Am, But This Is My Home” is a nomadic photography project that has been continuing since 2019. The artist travels to nameless desert places and puts a flag on them with a transparent canvas. This flag bears no images, colors, stamps, or slogans. It takes the landscape to its surface and becomes a focal point of its environment. Normally, carrying a flag is an act of proclaiming or vocalizing one’s identity, a definite contrast to the rest of the world. The setting of a flag is a conquest, colonization, space marking, an attempt to possess it.

In this project the transparent flag loses its usual symbolism and acquires a new one: it becomes about openness to the world, about readiness to perceive and accept, not separating itself but dissolving. It is a project about a floating, fluid identity that does not divide space into “us” and “them,” does not distinguish home from not home, and is ready to change, to adapt—not for survival but for understanding and productive coexistence. The project also explores the concept of home by trying to deprive it of colonial connotations and by perceiving home as more of a feeling, an emotional state, without territorial or object belonging.

Olia Fedorova
Olia was born in 1994 in Kharkiv, where she lives and works. She is a multidisciplinary conceptual artist, using mainly the media of performance, photography, video, and text. The artist focuses on the study of mechanisms and problems (trans)formation of meanings, interaction with the environment as a semantic space through the practice of performative intervention, observation and writing.

https://www.oliafedorova.com/

@olia_off