Since 2021, Lilit Matevosyan's practice has centred on the history, nature, and urban environment of the Greater Sochi region, where her family has lived since the late 1990s. Her long-term research began with the project Resort Affair (2021), in which the artist attempts to deconstruct the Soviet tourist image of the city through work with personal archives of Sochi residents, collage-making, and mediated walks.

In 2023, with the research project An Island Surrounded by Land, Matevosyan turned to the history of the Caucasian War and its devastating consequences for the Adyghe people — the indigenous inhabitants of the Black Sea coast of the North-Western Caucasus — which shaped the future development of their culture beyond the reach of wider visibility. Working on this project within the Field Research programme in 2023–2024, Matevosyan explored the deep entanglement between the lifeworld of the Shapsug (a subethnic group of the Adyghe) and the local natural environment, as well as the contemporary transformations of the landscape driven by the expansion and renewal of Sochi's tourist infrastructure that began in the mid-2010s.

The artist's book An Island Surrounded by Land / Even Boxwood Does Not Remember is published in an edition of 10 copies and consists of two volumes — An Island Surrounded by Land and Even Boxwood Does Not Remember — housed in a handmade felt case. It takes the form of a travelogue, bringing together photographs, notes, and texts by Lilit Matevosyan alongside interviews and archival materials selected and edited in collaboration with the research participants. Adyghe artists Milana Khalilova and Mila Khatsuk were invited to contribute to the book.