Photographs in a photograph. There is a fascinating and painful short circuit in this image: a woman, in the rubble of a bombed and destroyed house, leans over some old photographs of her. She gazes at them, and she takes the time – in the destruction – to come to terms with what has been saved. It is a fragile but double salvation: because not only those scraps of paper were saved; the black and white story they tell has also been saved. Is it an illusion? Perhaps yes, but there is no human being who deprives himself of it, who does not feed it. On the outskirts of Chernihiv it is a desperate illusion, because the war destroys the family albums of the past, but also the family albums of the present. It leaves gaps in future group photographs, breaks ties, makes ‘memory of memory’ impossible.
I use the expression that gives the title to a very beautiful book by the Russian writer Maria Stepanova. She opens an old trunk full of objects and photographs, and she feels the vertigo not of memory but of non-memory. Because so many of those ‘family’ faces are foreign to her, unknown to her. How can you remember everything, remember everyone?
In short, what did I have in mind, what was I going to do all these years? I wanted to build a monument to these people, to ensure that they do not disperse without a mention, without a memory. In the meantime, when the facts proved, it turned out that I was the first to not remember them.