This project started with my fascination with how recent humans actually started to identify themselves as righteously as we do now. We not only have names, surnames, middle names, age, year of birth, but citizen numbers, insurance numbers, identity card numbers, phone numbers etc. And all that while in the beginning of 20th century some people had no clue how old they were and did not even have surnames and were required to make them up for the growing apparatus of bureaucracy.

But as machines and most importantly data storage were rapidly improving, our perception of identity started shifting, too.

I found censuses to be the best material for tracing what was perceived as common knowledge about yourself, who was putting in the data and who was reading and processing it.

And as I was drowning in archives, I realised that when ticked boxes came, suddenly census has turned from 6 questions to 6 pages of information.

This artefact is a Russian census from 2002 I have embroidered in. I wanted to appreciate how much information I am putting into these boxes. I took me 2 hours and as I took off the paper frame, these dots and letters lost their narrative and dissolved into data.