In 2022 I left Russia because of the war and came to Tbilisi, Georgia, partly by circumstance, partly for love. I stayed for two and a half years.

Big Cherry is a diaristic record of that time: rented apartments and people who lived in them, small objects from ordinary days, the long stretch of hours between leaving one home and arriving somewhere that isn't home yet. Much of it is waiting and the silent, uneventful work of detaching from the ground one used to stand on, with nothing solid yet underneath.

The title borrows from New York's Big Apple. Tbilisi had become something like that — a place pulling people in from everywhere for different reasons: Georgians, students from Nigeria and India, Russians, my partner and me. All of us passing through and looking for somewhere to land.