Conceived under the form of a personal diary and memoir composed by the leader of the group, Yan Khtovich, the book builds a narrative through the combination of written accounts, images, documents, collages, and contemporary photographs printed with old printing techniques. The result is a realistic account of this experimental operation, and the reader is guided into believing the accuracy of the story with a mindfully tailored path of historical and personal facts about the so-called “author” Yan Khtovich and his work for the Spy Pigeon project.

Initiated by the notion of the employ of pigeons during wartime (a historical fact), mainly as messengers, the artist, born and raised in a country such as Russia where propaganda has always overcome the actual historical truth, also addresses the über contemporary concept of post-truth. Named by the Oxford Dictionary as the 2016 word of the year, the lemma has become part of our vocabulary due to the incredible outburst of fake news and manipulated information the world has witnessed lately.

Constructed in the context of contemporary research, the thought-provoking project creates a non-ceasing dialogue between today and the past, between fiction and truth, with an innovative language-based -of course- on photographic material, but also the combination images with other forms of so-called documentation of the past. The result is a poetical and delicate memoir of a non-existing -yet real- Yan Khtovich and his story.