Narva suffered badly in World War II. In March 1944, the city was almost entirely destroyed by bombing. Eighty years later, plenty of scars from that time remain. Many are still visible in the form of pockmarks and craters on the façades of different buildings around town. Most people don't notice them at all, but for Ingrian artist Pavel Rotts, they are almost impossible to miss.

These traces of historical violence have "become like blind spots," says Rotts, as we talk in the upstairs kitchen at the Narva Art Residency (NART). "But I'm really trained in that," he tells me. "My eye is always looking for these traces. And I see them."

It's a skill Rotts has been honing since 2018, when he began his participatory art project "Climbing a Memory" in Helsinki. After mapping out traces of World War II bombing damage on the granite walls of the Finnish capital, he then made casts of the negative space left behind. Rotts used those casts to create a series of artificial climbing holds, like the ones you might grab onto when scaling a practice wall at a gym.

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Climbing is also a nice metaphor or "a hook for memory," Rotts says. "You can touch and hang a memory on these craters. But on a more personal level, why I feel a connection to climbing is that it is a very tangible thing. The tips of your fingers are touching the surface of the object you are trying to hook onto. And especially if you climb up high without rope, your life is dependent on that. This makes the shape of these traces very important," he says.

"My project is about how we deal with trauma, how we heal trauma and how we overcome trauma," Rotts says. "I wanted to use my body as a tool for this research and climbing takes the entire attention of your body. You can't think about anything else when you need to climb. [There are] a lot of different studies, a lot of different practitioners, and therapists who work with climbing as a [way of] healing trauma."

After Helsinki, Rotts extended "Climbing a Memory" to include Narva. For this part of the project, which is called "The Matter of Touch," he's spent two years exploring the multiple meanings of World War II to the people who live here.

Rotts has found plenty more traces of wartime bombing damage in Narva during that time – none more vivid, however, than the example he spotted the first day he arrived in town.

"Believe or not, we just took a taxi from the railway station, and at this crossroads, when we were crossing, I was looking around and immediately spotted this site," Rotts tells me. "I was like 'woah, such a huge trace!' I immediately saw this bombing trace."

The damage he saw that day is on the façade of a building in the city's Kreenholm district, a short walk from the Narva Art Residency. I've passed it many times, I tell Rotts, but never previously given it a second thought.

"This is the best comment I get," he smiles. "When people say that they didn't notice it before. This is exactly what I am trying to do with my project. Even though it might sound ambitious because what am I doing that's so big people [might] change their perceptions?"

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And Rotts' project certainly is ambitious. When I arrive in Narva to meet him, he's conducting a workshop, in which we learn how to make bricks from scratch from locally sourced clay. It's one of several he's run over the last few weeks, providing a novel and engaging way of introducing people to his research, while also encouraging them to think about these "blind spots" in a new light.

"I feel the vibe, that people get excited at some point – they really like to do these things and work with this hands-on material," he tells me afterwards. "I've also been shaping my introduction speech – what I say and how I say it. Because sometimes in the beginning I was maybe touching on too many things, too many topics, but then I decided – just concentrate on one."

It's fair to say that the issues he's dealing with are complex and it's hardly surprising that everyone involved in his workshops takes something different away from the experience. "Some people just come to build a brick, without thinking too much more about it," Rotts says. "But then they get to know why."

No matter who takes part, there's always a moment, when he notices a shift occurring, as the participants become aware that there's actually a deeper concept behind all this. "I feel that people are starting to think, 'ah, wow, it can be so complex – it's not just a brick,'" he laughs.

On the day I'm in Narva, a small group of Ukrainian teenagers also joins in with the workshop.

"For me, that's also a very big responsibility," he says. "Especially for them, I need to emphasize that I have a certain topic. I work with these kinds of (historical) conflicts, like Russia and the counter-offense, the occupation of Estonia and the war against Finland. If I'm talking about these kinds of war memories to a Ukrainian person, then who am I to tell (them) that, you know?"

"Yes, my grandparents went through that, and I work with their memories and histories, but I myself have never faced war. So, this is shaky ground for me. That's why I consciously say, 'hey, I have this topic, it's relevant, but rather still I'm [working ]in this historical territory.'"

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Not that there's anything ambiguous about Rotts' views on Russia's war in Ukraine. The white t-shirt he's wearing has the words "NO PUTIN NO" written across it in huge black letters. It's one he produced himself, for a campaign he set up with a friend in Helsinki to raise money for Ukrainians.

"As a person with a Russian background, you have to be aware that you always need to be very clear about your position," Rotts says. "Because yes, unfortunately, people usually pre-assume things."

"I'm from Russia, but I'm Ingrian," he explains. His grandparents and great-grandparents hail from the historical region along the Gulf of Finland in what is now part of northwestern Russia. Estonia too "is a big part of this story," Rotts says.

"Because they [members of his family] were in Klooga concentration camp during the war. They were living in Estonia after the war and were also deported from Estonia straight after the Estonian deportations, or as a part of that, basically. So, they were one of the repressed national minorities in Soviet times."

Rotts' aim, both here and in Helsinki, has been to explore how understandings of World War II connect to people's own personal stories and the experiences of their family members. In the same way, it was Rotts own family history from that period that provided an "obvious connection for me with Narva," he says. This is what led him to apply for the residency here at NART in the first place.

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At the end of the workshop, a row of freshly made bricks sits triumphantly on the table at the Narva Art Residency. Some are decorated with hand-carved inscriptions, others have been stamped using Cyrillic letters from Soviet-era typewriters.

Rotts is pleased that people have re-used those letters, re-claiming them and, in some cases, manipulating them to spell out words, as if they were just warped characters from the Latin alphabet (Using the Cyrillic "я" as an "R" for instance).

"This was the Soviet occupational language in Estonia, which was used in different posters and newspapers for propaganda purposes," Rotts says. "So, this is exactly what I wanted – to turn this language around, because my project is counter-occupational. It brings out another side of the story, and showing the Soviets were not the saviors they pertained to be, he explains.

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It's time for me to leave Narva, but there's still one more of "Climbing A Memory" to come after I depart. The bricks we've made in the workshop will be taken up the road to the Kreenholm factory – a location which itself is one of the enduring symbols of Narva's Soviet-era importance and subsequent decline. There, during a special ceremony, they'll be fired in an oven along with the casts Rotts has made from that wartime damage.

"If you're talking about metaphors and symbolic things, of course, it's even getting a bit too obvious," Rotts smiles. "But when you create a sculpture, you think about this idea of negative sculpture, which makes tangible something that is actually absent. And when it's absent matter caused by war, it's important, because you're recreating this wound. You're healing the wound in a way."

"It's like the idea of the Phoenix, which is reborn from fire," Rotts says, of what will be the grand finale of this part of his project. "And in this way, the fire which destroyed Narva, is creating it once again."

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More information about Pavel Rotts' "Climbing a Memory" project can be found here.

On Friday June 14 Rotts' public installation  "Ascending a Memory" opened at the Narva Castle Park. The installation is in the form of a colorful climbing wall made using casts Rotts took of war-era bombing damage in Narva. More information is available here.