In the “Hundred Years’ War” project, together with curator
Marth von Loeben, I tell stories about the war of the past, and its further ghostly presence in everyday life. This is a project about post-memory, and it incorporates the family memories and the history of the city where I grew up. I appeal to the topic of war and its legacy because being raised in post-Soviet environment and annexed Crimea, I was convinced that war is only about victory, heroism and pride. The accent was always put on “their” inhumanity, but the inhuman behavior of “us” was deliberately forgotten. Such rhetoric was repulsive, because life consists not only of victories, so I wished to get under the skin of this patriotic and propagandistic image and find the human core there: feelings and simple tears. Due to allegorical language of the project it was possible, considering the censorship, to restore gaps in the narrative, since traumatic experience from the past was hushed up or denied by official historical agenda, and simply by people because of fear or shame. It turned out to be very destructive to keep the silence.
Using images and stories, we’ve built a psychological space for discussing trauma in the present, so that we would never repeat the experience of our ancestors. I never thought that it would be necessary to fix the reality, that I would have to work not with archives and memories, but with a horrible present. What can art do in such conditions? It does not seem to directly save lives or protect, feed or heal. In peacetime, it is difficult to find a sense in art practice, and now it is even harder. But I see the point in fixing feelings, in the chronicle of events through the heart. All for humanising the pain, protecting our memory, so that later nobody could manipulate it for the sake of the new myth.