This is my painting series I started three months before the full-scale Russian invasion. I thought about weak gestures of resistance from people left in Donbas, such as diligent work on private pieces of land in the occupied territories. Those are meant to be the last areas where the local population still has some “control”. How can something not influential at all be “effective” in general? In these war days, when I dream about Donbas returning to the Ukrainian territories, I think about all those uncontrolled processes of growth, wilting, decomposition, healing or horrible metamorphoses that happened there for the past eight years.
The metaphors of growth, transformation and mutation are essential to me because the longer I stay far from home, the less I know what is really going on there.
I don’t know how the visible and invisible consequences of war are being changed and are changing everything around. I have a constant feeling that something is happening there all the time. Something slow and secret, completely invisible to our eye, exactly like roots in the garden.
Previously, one of my main points in this project was the loss of subjectivity that turned the people of the occupied territories (and me, who moved to Ukraine) into passive participants and observers of events. Feeling helpless, I thought a lot about scenarios where the role of the human is secondary. At the same time, nature and non-human beings can influence the course of events and maybe, even lead to a happy ending. The plants I painted had previously unknown properties and could return voice, heal political blindness or even cure insensibility. I don't need those properties anymore. I see that the full Russian invasion almost destroyed the original sense of work and totally transformed my experience as a passive observer. The incredible strength, connection, involvement and solidarity of Ukrainian cultural workers and all fellow citizens in general are much stronger than any root system.