once a year the stick shoots by Nastasiia Leliuk and Natalia Wiernik

A poetic exploration of how war reshapes meaning, turning ordinary symbols into threats. In a fractured landscape of memory and language, even a blossoming branch may echo violence - reminding us how trauma distorts what we once held as familiar.

Branches or weapons? Nature or violence? Childhood imagination or brutal reality?

This book poses questions that resist simple answers.

once a year the stick shoots is a powerful collaboration between photographers Nastasiia Leliuk (Ukraine) and Natalia Wiernik (Poland), exploring how war reshapes our perception of imagery, language and symbols. Coming from different contexts but sharing a profound sensitivity, the artists construct a visual manifesto of memory, resistance and empathy.

The title plays on the dual meaning of “to shoot” — to sprout and to fire a weapon — capturing the tension between life and destruction at the heart of the book. Set against a stark black background, the images are haunting and poetic: branches that resemble rifles are juxtaposed with images of real guns and weapons. This visual dialogue confronts the viewer with the innocence of childhood play set against the brutality of war — growth opposed to violence.

Spring 2022, usually a time of renewal, marked the beginning of terror in Bucha, Irpin, Kharkiv, and beyond. For many Ukrainians, the first buds of spring became a backdrop to fear, trauma, and loss.

Yet this book doesn’t document war directly. It reflects its psychological imprint — how a stick can become a rifle, how language struggles to carry pain without repeating it. It speaks to the subtle, pervasive way violence invades the everyday. That symbolic violence is also present in the physical book: a single bullet-like hole pierces every page, transforming the volume into a wounded object — a silent witness and tangible trace of trauma. The project resonates with what Hal Foster called traumatic realism — a symbolic attempt to represent the unrepresentable.

Still, this is not a book about despair. It’s a book about resistance. About memory. About how images, when seen with empathy, can become acts of protest. Art may not end conflict, but it can preserve the fragile, restore meaning, and help us witness.

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Inspired by Nastasiia Leliuk’s 2022 work Once a Year the Stick Shoots and further developed by Natalia Wiernik, the project first appeared as an installation in the 2023 exhibition HOW ARE YOU, a continuation of the Welcome project curated by Natalia Wiernik.