Special places 1

2024

Photo

The space of war is the space of the unspoken. On the one hand, any reportage photograph—or even just a photograph of a crime scene—conveys an event: a trauma, a wound. It highlights it, speaks of it. On the other hand, like most reports, it remains silent about the contradictions within the war zone: the denial of war, the protest against it, the reluctance and refusal to accept it. Feeling the impossibility of any true documentation, I searched for gaps that would allow me to speak of what cannot be documented—to commit a kind of betrayal against photography itself, or against the imposed official demands that dictate the display of trauma. I wanted—and still want—to cross out any imposed purpose and simply preserve the experience. Clumsily, incompletely, yet holding on to that precious experience that resists being structured as propaganda or collective will. 

These photographs were created in October 2024 during research in the Mykolaiv region, along the shattered pipelines of the Mykolaiv Vodokanal, which has had no access to drinking water since April 2022. Vodokanal workers who accompanied me took part in the research; their stories continue to reveal much to me about this chapter of the Russian war in Ukraine. These areas—small villages between Kherson and Mykolaiv—were sites of temporary occupation, troop deployment, and artillery shelling in 2022, and they remain under drone and rocket attacks to this day.

After her trip to Mykolaiv Yevgenia Belorusets has also published a text dedicated to weapanizng water in the war and to human rights in the war: in German in Berlin Review and in English in ISOLARII.