Adults imagine that the world of childhood is surrounded by the cheerful feelings and sweet memories. Little girls who look like angels, good-natured toys, and older companions filled with the best intentions. None of this is true. Childhood is full of milk with a skin on it, cruel peers from the neighboring courtyard, and vindictive little owners of dolls dressed in pink from the next stairwell.
Alla Esipovich’s photographic series Sandbox is about the fact that childhood is, in reality, ugly. It is a kind of affliction that cannot be overcome. You can only live through it and forget it. That is why the most frightening thing that can happen to a person is to remain stuck in that time forever. To be small means to be cast out beyond the circle of ordinary life. In this sense, adults are like children left to their own devices: they will never forgive another’s weakness or another’s misfortune. And childhood is a monstrous phantom that, fortunately, disappears with time for most of the living.
Alya Esipovich’s Sandbox is also about something else. It is about the fact that even after entering adult life, we remain defenseless. We remain children who never learned hopscotch from their friends, never mastered pulling themselves up on the horizontal bar, and never learned to win the battle for survival within the closed circle of the courtyard playground. Adult life also turns out to be a deception: we remain vulnerable all the same. And yet, it may be that this very inability to resist is what makes us human – the kind of people we wanted to become in childhood, when we played at being cosmonauts and sailors, strong and just, real heroes. Time slips through our fingers like sand from a sandbox. Mother will not come. Never.