• OLEKSANDRA VORONINA •
By inertia
I forget a lot of things that happened before February 2022. I realize that the war has been going on for many years, but still, it did not have such a stressful effect on my consciousness before. It was rather a depression lasting several years. And now I don’t remember the people with whom I communicated. I remember only my friends and relatives. Every day I don’t let go of my mobile phone, constantly following the news and scrolling through my friends’ social media. This is how I can understand that they are still alive and sometimes they follow my stories on social media. I have no strength to call and write to them. Lives of probably all Ukrainians and mine have changed. My personality seems not to exist, it seems to have disappeared. Now I am a person from Ukraine, lonely with uncontrollable emotions and huge baggage.
Despite the fact that the war united us all in the struggle and disgust for russia, it also made many lonely. I consider the issue of women`s loneliness. I observe how my friends were forced to leave their country, family, home and usual life and ended up in a foreign environment, others stayed at home, but against the background of emotional upheaval, they began to feel discomfort and some kind of stress in meetings with other people. Most adapt and partially return to normal life.
I write confusedly, my mood and thoughts change faster than I can control them. All ordinary things, everyday scenes have changed their color. Every scene of life is common, but you can feel that something happens with normal reality. Everything that you do now, you did it before, but now you see everything through the prism of war, because you can’t stop thinking about the war. After all, you can not distract yourself from the horrors that you have seen, read or heard. You always think about it when you wake up and when you fall asleep.
When I paint, I think about raped, mutilated people, about torture chambers and people who got into them. Every positive news about the liberated territories of Ukraine in the following days reveals new horrors that happened there. You cannot rejoice in the freedom of people, you immediately feel the horror of what these people will tell later. I think of Azov, how Ukrainian soldiers were tortured and then set on fire to cover the tortures, how russian crushed women with tanks. How the grandmother of my friend whom we had been looking for in the occupied city, which is under devastating constant shelling for a long time refused to evacuate. And when she was evacuated after a long time, she was became crazy. About the inscription ”children” on the roof of the theater in Mariupol and that this did not stop the russian military from dropping a bomb there. About the human shield of Ukrainian musicians that the russians put in front of them. About how the Chechens were the first to kill dogs when they entered the village. How a russian woman suggested her soldier husband to rape Ukrainian women. You can never comprehend the depth of what a human being can do, when they are given complete freedom and impunity.
I think that probably the majority of people in Ukraine have post-traumatic syndrome to one degree or another. About how those people who defend Ukraine and those who have lost too much will return home to civilian life. I think about all those people who don’t care about this war or are tired of it.
Oleksandra Voronina
Born 1990 in Kiev, Ukraine. Studied graphic at the Ukrainian Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture in Kiev. Since 2016 became an assistant intern in the department of graphics of the Ukrainian Academy of Fine Arts and Architecture. Studied classical graphic techniques, in most of the work used a technique of etching. She works with different directions of the fine arts, such as: grapchic, sculpture, painting, installation. Now she works with volume forms. Basically, her work is based on my observation of the relationship between people. She also build on the influence of a person or social group on my emotional background, on my own feelings. She is interested in how shapes and colors influence the viewer, his mood, and what thoughts he is led to.