Throughout her practice, Margarita Maximova considers the many ways in which our contemporary image-making technologies and their indivisible link to communication, sociability and memory-making operate. Her first book, You Have Within You Something Stronger and More Numinous is a continuation of that process with a focus on the written word. The book discloses a collection of excerpts from letters sent to her by her mother over the previous decade. The selection of translated texts describes her mother's venturesome relocation from Russia to Belgium, her childhood in the Russian dachas, close observations of the landscape and her pursuit to retrieve a connection with her ancestors. Set amongst the political landscape and cultural fabric of the Soviet Union, the telling of her experience reveals the nuances of intimacy, displacement, motherhood and the psychic traumas that are so often inherited from previous family generations.

Book design by Atelier Brenda.