Social

personal project​
gallery Dzyga, Lviv, Ukraine

A stone. The piece of solid rock. Using it people can build a home, or break a head with it.

A bread. It is called a shrine, for which people can break a head with a stone.

Shrine. Those who believe in it are called humans, and defending it makes people unhuman.

There is no room for analysis in a narrow world of absolute values.

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Mystical-mythological future with a three-room apartment, Euro-repair and “Polish car numbers – “plaques” in a garage. A tragicomic scene with new promises before the elections and overthrowing grief-politicians at the kitchen tables. And every time under unexpected cataclysms, we have empty shelves in the stores and a panic in the media. Moreover, each time we blush when we need to tell a foreigner about our realities. A small planet with its laws, values, and reality.

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Aggressively protecting some our values, we neutralize the importance of others. When someone encroach on something deliberately holy, the mind is blurred by aggression. The double standards appear – “the goal justifies the means”, absolute values replace humanity.

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The project is a long-term reflection on the processes taking place in our country. I would like to draw attention to the reason of the former USSR society isolation, their undesirability / inability to leave their own “little planet”. After the previous difficult history of the population, communism killed individuality, initiative, and the need to care about the future. Historical traumas affect values. The values of survival replace the values of self-realization. Every turn in the circle we stumble to the history – to its ignorance, unwillingness, and inability to analyze it.

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Our society is infantile, but with a huge luggage of terrible experience. An experience that is more likely to be forgotten than rethinked and lived again. We are afraid to become hungry again. We are afraid to believe that in this country you can dream and fulfill dreams. We are afraid of the responsibility for our words, so we remain silent. A constant hanging anxiety for such a desirable and frightening future.

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Fear and injury can be a resource or a means of manipulation. Safety is the next need after physiological needs, and today even the most basic needs are becoming a matter of stability. Such things as a bread, social payouts, mythical future become the objects of manipulation, the Achilles heel on the way towards taking the right decisions. The focus on the hard past shadows the view of the apparent present.

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By doubting values and traditions, in no way I disclaim or devaluate them. This is rather a quick question: are these values really the values? Could somewhere among them be a fear / a offense / a feeling of guilt?

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Double standards, the desire to “leave that country”, greediness and imitation of quality. This is our reality that twistsitself in a whirlwind and holds us with pliers.To learn how to be with this reality, one must understand why it is like it is. Understanding the reasonprovides a chance to correct the consequences. Where is the boundary between the serious inevitable consequences of the past, and the inwilingness / infantile fear to accept / rethink it? Where is the boundary between irresponsible decisions and constrained circumstances?

 

In the project are used the research data of psychologists Viktoriya Gorbunova and Vitaliy Klymchukin the area of trauma of the past.