Santa Barbara
When I was seven years old, living with my family in Moscow, my mother woke me up in the middle of the night and said we were going on a trip. The year was 1996. The Soviet Union had long collapsed, and by then, so had my family. We left without saying goodbye to my father, and the next day landed in a new world: America.
Inspired by the 1980s American soap opera Santa Barbara, my mother placed an advertisement through a Russian agency, in search of a man who could help her come to America. She was 35. We arrived to California, specifically the town of Santa Barbara, and were met by an older man who would soon become her husband, and take the place of my own father. And this is where the story begins. The idea of touching something that felt untouchable.
To re-imagine the past, I collaborated with the original scriptwriter of Santa Barbara, cast a set of actors to play my family, and traveled back to both of my childhood homes to re-enact the departure and arrival to America.
“It’s a fairy tale straight out of the soaps. The brave mother and her little boy and girl are hungry and cold. Then a fairy godmother appears, waves her magic wand and transports the young woman and her two babes to the magical city of their longing. This is where the fairy tale ends and real life picks up.
— Lynda Myles, screenwriter of the 1980s soap opera Santa Barbara
"Diana Markosian’s Santa Barbara explores the nature of family and the American dream. Through a series of staged photographs and a narrative video, the artist reconsiders her family history from her mother’s perspective, relating to her for the first time as a woman, rather than as her daughter, and coming to terms with the profound sacrifices she made to become an American."
-Erin O'Toole, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
“Markosian’s commitment to mining the deepest parts of herself to reconcile a history that shaped the course of her life gives the book its power. But so too does the story of her mother, and indeed the story of many other mothers too, which sits at its heart: a story that is far from the glossy world of the Santa Barbara soap opera but shaped by necessity, pain and courage.”
- Hannah Abel Hirsch, British Journal of Photography
