Novovolynsk
2018
You will not see a border
Some borders are as notional as the difference between black and white and colour photography.
At the time when war in Eastern Ukraine was becoming a given, a false idea about deep culturological differences between Western and Eastern Ukraine was used to justify it and to prove its irreversibility.
From 2014-16 I photographed mines which were continuing to operate in places where it seemed as though peaceful everyday life ought have come to a halt, in order to make way for the emergency of war. But this hadn’t happened. Instead, the mines, schools and hospitals all carried on functioning, just as they had before the artillery fire started, even though the bombardments could destroy a city’s infrastructure in a mere half an hour.
Although it might seem otherwise, the selected colour photographs do not bear witness to the usual activity of a coal mine. The act of continuing to work while war is raging all around becomes a political choice, a resistance to the rules of conflict, a human gesture offered to the public, to the world.
the Black and white photographs were taken in a coal seam in Western Ukraine in 2017.
They show the landscape of a few government-owned coal mines which were slowly ceasing their activity. Surrounded by nature, they are near to Novovolynsk, a small town close to the Polish border.
The workers in the black and white pictures took a stand. Throughout 2015 and 2016 they fought for the closure of their mine in accordance with environmental norms. Determined not to let the sudden closure of their mine become an ecological catastrophe for the town where they would doubtless be consigned to carry on living, they travelled to Kiev, and took part in protests lasting several days, declaring a hunger strike, and attempted to attract media attention.
Some borders exist as if by chance, and still they turn out to be lasting and immovable. But there are other borders which threaten to appear, the ground is laid for them, and finally they materialise. Yet at the same time they retain a shaky, movable structure – because people refuse to believe in them, and will not accept them.
