The Sun fell down

Everything became an archive. 7th floor, a sound of wind, kids building constructions from ice. Everything, what used to be a repeated act from season to season, from childhood to youth, got a gap, lost its momentum.

"A sun is not quite a sun unless it’s radiant

And a spring is not quite a spring unless it’s limped"

Photographing my homeplace, neighborhood, familiar streets, and villages on analog, mostly black and white film, and later printing in a darkroom, helped me to develop this sense of time, a surreal feeling that the present in Ukraine is no longer actual because it can change any second. People at home say that "we are still stuck there, before the first rockets flew, the spring did not come". This doesn’t mean that they live in the past, it rather has to do with this phenomenon of time perception, when the present is so shocking and rapid, the reality the society was forced to face, changes life forever.

Near Kyiv, In the village of my grandparents, which was deocupied only a few months earlier, I encountered young boys playing with toyguns. I remember these kids stopping every car, which was about to enter the village, fearlessly running behind every vehicle and asking the purpose of the visit and making sure that there are no aliens coming in town. They were from a local school, having holidays, which were different from any other free time from school, i could imagine. Kids played a bizarre game. The sun was behind the summer haze and I could not find it with my eyes.

I walked around the block, everything looked familiar and yet so alienated. Frozen cars in green bushes, silent playgrounds swallowing the echo. My camera felt rapidly few dozens grams heavier. Once you are not able to return to the place where you had your peace and shelter for years, your mind cannot simply comprehend the urgency of change and the sun falls down.