I open the big wooden box of old family photographs and carefully pick the ones taken more than twenty years ago in the town of Korostyshiv, situated 100 km west of Kyiv, Ukraine. There are many family memories attached to this place. My mother was born there. It has always been a place where our family members would gather, sitting around the table and telling stories from our family history. Korostyshiv is where my roots are, where I spent a lot of time thinking about memory and connection to the place, and the importance of passing down family memories through generations.
Since the beginning of the conflict in eastern Ukraine, there are over one million internally displaced persons. Once I read online that a group of IDPs settled in an old summer camp in Korostyshiv. The camp is ten minutes’ walk from our house and my sister and I know it from the time we were little. Imagining these families in an environment that I know well, yet which is entirely new for them, made me think about the detachment from one’s memory and place, about the loss of everything meaningful, and about the difficulties of settling in a new place and not being able to return to your home.
I met a family from a little town in Luhansk region, who fled in the summer of 2014 and now live in this camp in Korostyshiv. I immediately felt a strong connection with two sisters Liliya and Yuliya, and Yuliya’s daughters - Anya, 10, and Nastia, 8. I also grew up with my younger sister. They shared memories of how they spent time with their grandparents in the country house. They also talked about their own big wooden box of old photographs, some of which they were able to bring to Korostyshiv only recently.
I spend some time with that family. I told them my story and they shared memories about their lost home, childhood spent in Korostyshiv and important places. At a time when there are so many displaced people in Ukraine, this project is an attempt to explore the meaning of the place and its role for memory, and how the loss of access to the place affects one’s memories. It is also an attempt to discover how layers of history and identity shape our lives and our interaction with the new environment.
I photographed the family on a summer day, their poses mirroring the old black & white photos taken by my parents in the very same places in Korostyshiv. It is a collaborative attempt to create a modern family album, combining our memories from different times. The collages are done in a rather childish manner, as childhood memories are often the strongest.
In the end, it became a personal exploration of my roots and a meditation on the possible detachment from everything that is my foundation in life.
