A Vulnerable Place, presented as part of 48h NK, explores memory, data, and boundaries — physical, political, technological, and psychological.
Marina Merkulova collects coordinates of places and personal memories from people who have experienced migration or refugee status — places they cannot return to. She locates these sites and captures screenshots through online street-view services, primarily Google Street View. Where Google is unavailable, she turns to alternative platforms; when a place proves completely inaccessible, the search for information itself becomes part of the work.
Maps reveal not only space but also political reality. Google Street View is absent in some countries, while others rely on independent platforms — Chinese services, or Here WeGo, among them. This patchwork of imagery reflects spheres of influence, economic pressures, and armed conflict: conditions beyond the artist's control that become part of the history the work investigates.
The work does not attempt to restore lost places. Instead, it investigates the blurring of boundaries. Personal memory, passed through open data and digital aberration, becomes ever more vulnerable — and it is the handmade print that restores its contour, holding it back from dissolving into the stream of digital images.
As part of the exhibition, Marina Merkulova enters into dialogue with painter Miguel Angel Espinoza, whose work insists on presence as a way of belonging. His paintings reflect on what it means to observe a city through the eyes of a precarious migrant worker — someone who seeks tenderness and routine by embedding his observations in community and the small, sacred things that hold it together. Through a series of postcard-format paintings, Espinoza presents an emotional landscape where past and present blend, bending borders and insisting on identity as a form of relation.
