Emptiness. 2019-2021 “There are no people, no one lives there, only shrubs and trees. Close your eyes and you will hear the silence. Emptiness around and inside emptiness.”
For three years I travelled through remote villages of Ukraine. Places where life has been disappearing slowly, for a long time, without announcement. People move to cities in search of a future. Houses and entire villages collapse. The elderly remain, living out their days, leaving behind them only quiet. Empty roads, abandoned houses, landscapes that have learned to exist without people. But there were children. In the middle of all that disappearance, they were present. Alive. A kind of hope, though I knew they would leave when the time came. That is what young people do in places like these.
I never returned to most of these places. The project was not finished. There were plans to continue, to travel through all regions of the country, especially Donetsk region where I was born. Then the full-scale invasion began. The country became something else. And I understood that continuing was no longer possible, or necessary. Everything had already changed.
This project exists as a single handmade book.
