The photographs in Scars document the exact location where statues of Lenin and Stalin once stood in Europe’s former Eastern Bloc states. I began looking for these sites as an artist-in-residence at the Nida Artist’s Colony in Lithuania in 2014. In researching the area, I came across the story of a person that had self-immolated at a Lenin statue in a nearby town, just before the fall of communism, and I wanted to see the space. I did tons of research using old maps and photographs to find the location, but then realized that the driver taking into town that day knew exactly where the statue had been and could bring me right to it. That experience began a nine-year journey hunting down these sites all over the former Eastern Bloc. I was fascinated by examining the ways communities had healed these spaces long after the statues had been removed. While the Lenin’s had come down rapidly and sometimes violently following the withdraw of the Soviet Union from Europe, the Stalins had been systematically removed during a process of “destalinization” after Stalin’s death in 1953. In some cases, the absence of the statue is more obvious, while in others the local government has gone to great lengths to transform the space, revealing the trauma these monuments evoked. The resulting photographs often depict obscure public squares or city parks, but most local inhabitants know the significance of these sites, as if they are still charged with an ominous presence.