For our children and our children’s children to have to say

that there were once people, who never gave up

on their comrades and didn’t abandon their friends.

Nikolai Gogol

Leaves of October is a photographic work that drifts through the Europe of the last century—or rather, through the way Europe’s stories are depicted into the wounded semiotics of today. For many, the ruins of the Berlin Wall marked the end of social movements. But why should they? Class divisions persist, and in their ongoing war, it is still the powerful who prevail. Only the despair of the defeated—those abandoned by the social contract—maintains the fragile balance of a world edging toward its own quiet undoing. Haunted by this tension, Leaves of October unfolds like a ballad of political melancholy. It reflects on the fragmentary ways in which memory—both collective and personal—is written. It views the archive not as a fixed repository, but as a living carriage—carrying the line of trauma from the ruins of the past to the shadows of a looming dystopia. It traces the forms of resistance, and the tangled, contradictory thread that runs through them. It sets the remnants of the past against the dissonance of the present, expanding the idea of what the crucible of time might look like. In doing so, it asks how images might testify to the unspeakable, and how silence itself becomes a document of what has been lost. Through visual storytelling, it returns to something we’ve long known: That the flawed reading of signs, we call History.