Many things and people in Ukrainian culture remained only as nameplates in the cemetery: people's work was destroyed, and they were murdered. It takes a long time to realize that these are losses, not absences. Time passes, and new phenomena sprout from the cracks between the lost and the surviving, but each and every one of us feel places inside ourselves that are gaping with emptiness. Before the war, we thought how much of everything important was not described, there were not enough hands to describe it, and what was not described was therefore in danger of being forgotten. And now, as in the 1930s and 1940s, they want to destroy us. Cultural institutions began to develop and sprout, new schools, new kindergartens – now all of this is under threat, and some have already been destroyed. How to comprehend it?
Closed, destroyed universities, hospitals, kindergartens, schools, museums, shops, enterprises, factories, millions of people who left their homes, hundreds of thousands deported, and thousands killed. I don't want everything to be destroyed again. I don't want what was destroyed to be forgotten. I want the garden country to continue to grow. It was not the first time they came to destroy it. I don't want to forget anything. I am now a moving graveyard. This is my way of preserving what is destroyed around me and in me. A cemetery is a place of memories. A new life sprouts there, and the common garden in the cemetery is structured by different memories. So, in my cemetery garden, I do a utopian act of resurrection, an act of disagreement with another reproduction of nameless graves, violence, and murders. I disagree with that. The world is still impossible without war, but I disagree with this.