Modern Animal

Modern Animal by Yevgenia Belorusets is a second fiction book published in 2021. While writing the novel, Belorusets interviewed people along the Donbas region, approaching the Russian-Ukrainian conflict through stories about animals.

In the age of autofiction and its attendant narcissism, the young, Berlin-based Yevgenia Belorusets is a point of relief. Her work, grounded in years as a photo-journalist, is exuberant rather than premeditated. It brings together the stories of many to form its identity — ISOLARII

Modern Animal knots together humans and animals, retelling interviews, folktales, memories, and visions of the people – bourgeois, urban, rural, Roma, and working class – encountered on a five-year journey through Ukraine. A lecture format, following the Soviet style, disintegrates; as, at times, do logic and language. The product is a revolutionary approach to anthropology, what it means to become and behave like something else. Without judgment or simplification, Belorusets provides intimate revelations of human-animal relationships: how we shape each other, use each other, and, at times, cross the lines that distinguish us from one another. In conversation, she finds the lost and forgotten remains of something pagan, but still irrepressibly modern.

See also a photographic project Zhyvy Kutochok (The Living Corner) 2021 which unfolds stories presented in Modern Animal.

Yevgenia Belorusets. Modern Animal. Berlin. Isolarii. 2021. 270 pp. 

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