Snow and Flower (Nieve y Flor)

2015 – 2016

Snow and Flower (Nieve y Flor) retraces the story of the Romantic Diaspora, a singular migration phenomenon that lasted from the 1960s to the 1990s, involving the relocation of Soviet women to Cuba for love. Soviet women married to Cuban men have embodied a familiar social category in the Cuban imaginary for decades, and continue to constitute a substantial demographic—an estimated two thousand Russian women still live on the island.

The women moved to Cuba in the Socialist period, when ideological and political ties between the USSR and Fidel’s Castro’s Cuba were strong enough to somewhat obscure cultural differences between countries. This project aims to bring to light and preserve the memory of this peculiar migration process through the eyes of protagonists who lived the migration. Recreated using a pinhole camera, mental images and impressions associated with these women’s very first days in Cuba are lent a vanishing, dreamlike melancholy. The diaristic evocation of singular memories captures the collective tale of this peculiar social phenomenon which spanned decades of political shifts after the 1959 Cuban Revolution through the Cold War until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Annalisa Natali Murri is a freelance photographer who took up photography in 2009 while attending the Architectural and Urban Photography School in Valencia (Spain). On completing her studies in engineering, she gravitated to photography, focusing on personal research and documentary projects, inspired mainly by social issues and their psychological consequences. In 2014, she was selected to attend the LOOKbetween mentorship programme, and in 2015 she was named one of 30 emerging photographers at Photo District News’ 30. Her works have been awarded and highlighted at international contests and awards, including at the 70th and 71st Pictures of the Year International Competition, the Sony World Photography Award, Burn magazine’s Emerging Photographer Fund, and Catchlight’s Activist Awards.