In the series Postal Codes, Fedora Akimova turns to the materiality of writing, memory, and territory, creating objects in which political geography is interwoven with the corporeality of the hand-made gesture. On transparent fabric, landscapes of sky and bloodied ground emerge—visual metaphors of violence and loss. The contours of these landscapes coincide with the borders of Ukrainian regions under partial or full occupation: Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson. Each work is titled after the postal code of the region—a code that becomes a marker of inaccessibility: letters bearing these numbers no longer reach their addressees.

 

Here embroidery becomes not decorative, but a post-medium act, in which manual labor takes the form of a visual archive. According to Rosalind Krauss, post-medium practices abandon traditional media identity in favor of “hybrid forms where it is not the medium itself that matters, but the very structure of meaning.” In these objects, embroidery, transparent fabric, and found materials (Soviet-era hoops) form a critical syntax, where every element is charged with historical and symbolic weight.

 

The use of old embroidery hoops—as material witnesses of the past—underscores the connection between the Soviet legacy and today’s geopolitical traumas. The transparency of the fabric transforms the map into “wounds in the air,” invisible yet tangible ruptures in the fabric of collective memory.

 

These works can be read through a decolonial lens: they record the violent rewriting of maps and the simultaneous devaluation of local lives and cultures. The artist points to the fact that even such ordinary elements of infrastructure as postal codes become symptoms of political catastrophe—unseen signs of loss and the breakdown of communication.

 

As Boris Groys writes, “Contemporary art is not so much the production of new images as the archiving of the disappearing.” In this sense, Postal Codes functions as an archive of the impossible letter, an attempt to preserve lost routes of words, bodies, and lives.

 

Thus, the series opens up a space for critical reflection: it is not only the geography of war that is at stake here, but also the very logic of memory and communication put to an artistic test. Embroidery becomes a political gesture, and the map—at once a sign of ongoing violence and a testament to resistance against oblivion.