Tattoos of war

The «Tattoos of war» project is about layers. About collective memory. About reflections. About feelings and emotions. About what will remain with us forever.Everyone has their own, but we all talk about the same thing. About pain.

“It’s like we choose a picture and a memory that hurt us the most,” my friend tells me while preparing for one of the shootings, “but in fact, we’ve had thousands of such moments over the past year,” she adds.

We choose a photo. On the photo, the regional state administration of the city of Mykolaiv, my hometown, was bombed by a Russian missile from the shelling that took place on March 29, 2022. Then 37 people died, another 34 were injured. As a result of the attack, the central section of the building collapsed from the ninth to the first floor, so it took almost a week for rescuers to dismantle the debris.

I put on the projector. Marina and Serhiy, my friends from Mykolaiv, who also left the city a year ago, are sitting on the bed. The photo through the projector is superimposed on their bodies and faces in a separate layer, creating a new layer – a conditional “tattoo” that will remain with them forever. There are thousands, tens of thousands, millions of people like them. Each of us has our own “tattoo”. Each of us has our most painful memory. Collective pain.

Maria, my girlfriend, poses for me in our kitchen in the city of Ivano-Frankivsk, in western Ukraine, where we were forced to move and have been living for a year. Recently, her school in her hometown of Sumy on the border with Russia was also bombed, and her parents still live 500 meters away from it and do not want to move anywhere. Of course, she did not struggle with the choice of photo.

Projector, camera, taking pictures.

Another memory, another “tattoo” that will stay with her forever. Pain, excruciating pain.

Demian, my son – “poses” for me against the background of a photo with a bomb shelter of one of the many kindergartens in the country. Children spend time there during air alarms, drawing, playing. Thank God that I took my child to a safer place and he did not have to see and experience all this, but the “tattoo of war” will remain with him anyway, because he is a child of war, he knows what is happening now and is aware of all this, like an adult.

I can take thousands of such photos – with every person, with every child, with every courageous soldier and female soldier of our strong and unruly state. Because everything that is happening now is our common destiny, our history, which today is written with blood every day.

I believe that the work “Tattoos” will give the Western viewer a greater understanding of the situation in which the Ukrainian people live, but not through the prism of dry documentary photography, but through storytelling, through a narrative and a mix of conceptual and art photography.