Zhenya

“Meet me under the giant shopping cart at the entrance,” were the instructions I received from Zhenya when I arrived at a retro-themed mall in Hua Mak. We had only started talking a few weeks earlier, and I knew little about her beyond her distinctive look and the mysterious PARALLAX archive she was curating. Most of our conversation happened through Google Translate, giving the encounter the strange rhythm of an online chat taking place face to face.

We began with a few photographs inside the mall, but it quickly felt too contained. I suggested we walk outside, along the sois by the canal, where things felt less staged and more open to chance. Near the entrance, another shopping cart was waiting for us, abandoned by the water. I took her portrait there.

Russian-born, Zhenya comes from a background in graphic design, exhibitions and visual identity systems. She now curates PARALLAX, an independent archive that began in Bangkok and is intended to expand. It is built from physical encounters with places, combining photographs, environmental data and material traces, impressions from architectural surfaces, before translating them into graphic artefacts. Each encounter follows the same sequence: observation, material evidence, metadata, interpretation and archive. The method stays fixed while the city changes. As Zhenya puts it: “The structure is fixed. The encounter is not.”

Trying to understand PARALLAX, I started to reflect on my own endeavour. We are both building subjective archives: PARALLAX through places, mine through people. Its method is shaped by what a city reveals; mine depends on someone who can respond, redirect or alter how a portrait comes into being. As Zhenya reminded me, every archive is shaped by the person who builds it.

Camera in hand, I found myself doing something parallel. Within PARALLAX, an encounter with a place gives the work its weight; for me, the portrait begins in the fragile space between two people, at a moment that cannot quite be repeated. Perhaps this is where our projects touch most closely. As she wrote to me later, “A change in position does not necessarily change the object. It changes what the object reveals.”