Tribambuka: I Am Home

Anastasia Beltyukova, aka Tribambuka, is an award winning illustrator, artist and animation director, originally from St. Petersburg, Russia. She left home in search of home in 2010, got stuck in London during the eruptions of Eyjafjallajökull volcano, and has been living and working there happily ever since. Feeling the need to explore what home means for her, Anastasia started a project that not only shaped her as an artist, but coincided with the world’s events in a strange way.

In 2019, Anastasia was approached by Atelier 3I3, a little gallery in Porto, to create a series of Riso prints and two zines. “I was thinking a lot about what home is and how it defines our identity, or the other way around, so I thought it’s a good opportunity to explore this theme” says the illustrator. No longer living where she was born, and surrounded by others in a similar situation, Anastasia began to ask herself a series of questions; “I always wondered what home is for our nomadic generation? Is it where you were born? Is it where you live? Is it even a place? Is it a person? Is it a feeling?” She continues; “At first we don’t realise that we have a home. We are one with the world. Then we outgrow home, we leave home… or we lose home. We miss home. We seek home. We build home.” 

Anastasia asked many people what is home for them, and surprisingly never received two similar answers. Thus, she based her work on their answers and her own contemplations on the subject.

“We all seek our literal or metaphorical homes, whether we left or lost them. That search is at the heart of our odyssey through life and ultimately defines who we are. Home is about belonging, being fully yourself. In Jungian symbolism a home / house usually represents one’s psyche. The idea of home is inseparable from the idea of one’s identity. Our relationship with the concept of home transforms as we continually transform on the path of self-realisation. Once we find ourselves – we find the home we seek.”

Anastasia spent the most of 2019 exploring this theme. First, she played with her sketchbooks for a few months, writing down and sketching out all the ideas, listening to songs about home, and collecting various ephemera that could be used in collages. Later, these sketchbooks were used in a zine representing the artists’s diary. Printed in black and white, each copy has unique drawings with coloured pencils and Posca pens with an individual quote, suggested by Anastasia’s friends. She then selected the best ideas and created 15 artworks based on them, which were printed as a limited edition Risograph prints by Mundo Fantasma in Portugal.

“As part of the project was a research on identity, which took a bit more playful turn, I decided to have a look what great minds had to say about it, which left me even more confused” describes Anastasia. At the end of 2019, she felt like she had just opened a door to hundreds of other paths of exploration, and was hesitating which one to choose. She explains; “And then 2020 happened, revealing the dark side of the home archetype – turning from a safe haven into a confinement, a prison, or cocoon that holds you while you transform, a belly of the whale that devoured you before you get reborn, the liminal space… What is home when the rest of the world you know falls apart?”

Strangely, some of the prints that Anastasia didn’t quite understand suddenly started making sense and the meaning reveal itself. “The spookiest thing is that I made 2020 calendars and sent them to people asking what home is for them, and as 2020 unfolded – the illustrations weirdly rhymed with what was going on in the world” states Anastasia. For example, a print entitled Journey Home, weirdly depicts the lockdown, and featured as April in the calendar.

“As an artist, i’m really intrigued by this process and excited by witnessing such global shifts and being able to explore it. I see 2020 as a year that marks the emergence of the unconscious into consciousness, the crystallisation of chaos into order, the transcendence of compulsion into choice. What world shall we live in? What 2021 would teach us? “ 

www.tribambuka.co.uk
@tribambuka

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