In the two-channel video Fulcrum, Maxim Tatarintsev examines family memory as a driving force of personal history, revealing it through the experience of migration and the recurrence of displacement across generations. The work juxtaposes amateur footage shot by the artist’s great-grandfather in the 1960s in Baku with contemporary video recorded by Tatarintsev in the same locations more than half a century later. The archival material captures everyday scenes — walks, gatherings, moments of domestic life. These fragments serve as evidence of an attempt to establish a sense of home following a forced relocation during World War II. In contrast, the contemporary footage documents the same sites emptied of their former figures and narratives. The artist returns to these places within a different historical reality — as an emigrant who also left his home because of war and found himself in the city that once became a point of support for his family.
This visual dialogue between two temporal layers reveals the gap between personal memory and the transformed urban landscape. What once functioned as a backdrop for family chronicles now appears as an anonymous space in which memory exists only as projection. Within this discrepancy lies the experience of loss, the migration of meaning, and the gradual disappearance of what once defined a sense of belonging.

Fulcrum makes visible the generational movement: the repetition of routes, the shifting circumstances, and the search for stability under conditions of rupture. The notion of a “point of support,” reflected in the title, becomes symbolic rather than geographic — a point where past and present intersect, where memory is reconfigured and the individual negotiates the contours of home anew.