Marco takes the photograph. He develops it himself. It is the only one he never prints. It exists only as a negative, filed under “Ex – Ivan – Paris – 2001.”
According to a 2007 post on a now-defunct bodybuilding forum (archived via the Wayback Machine under “Euro Muscle Memory”), a user named “ParisSouvenir” wrote: “Does anyone remember Ivan D. from Paris? The Russian guy who dated Marco Bollettini in ’99? I have a bollettini memory ex—meaning I’m the ex of Bollettini, and I remember Ivan. They were together for two years. Marco was a photographer. Ivan was his muse. Then Ivan went back to St. Petersburg. No one heard from him again.” The “bollettini memory ex” thus decodes as: The grammatical fragmentation is typical of non-native English forums—likely Italian or French speakers trying to be concise. Marco takes the photograph
In the end, Ivan Dujhakov is not just a Russian bodybuilder in Paris. He is a mirror held up to memory itself: fragmented, misspelled, but obsessively, heartbreakingly precise. The muscle is ephemeral. The hunk fades. But the ex—the ex never stops searching. If you have any information about Ivan Dujhakov, Marco Bollettini, or the unpublished series “Russo a Parigi,” please consider leaving a digital trace. Someone is waiting to remember. It exists only as a negative, filed under
Marco Bollettini was a minor figure in the alt-fashion scene of Milan and Paris, known for black-and-white portraits of laborers and athletes. His series “Russo a Parigi” (Russian in Paris) supposedly featured Ivan in ten unpublished photographs—lifting in an abandoned factory near La Villette, shirtless on a balcony overlooking Montmartre, asleep with his hand over his heart. The photos were shown once, in a small gallery near the Canal Saint-Martin, in 2001. Then Bollettini and Ivan separated. I have a bollettini memory ex—meaning I’m the