From darkness, light emerges.
The Maidan barricades marked the affirmation of a people claiming the freedom to choose its own path — politically, culturally and collectively. This longing for openness and emancipation stands against an authoritarian logic that seeks to impose obedience, silence dissent and deny that freedom of choice.
Since February 2022, war has devastated Ukraine and challenged, in the most violent way, the freedom of millions of people to live, to choose, to remain, to leave and to shape their own future.
Across the country, I document buildings damaged or destroyed by war: gutted structures, collapsed roofs, gaping walls, furniture scattered like fragments of interrupted lives. These ruins are mute witnesses to chaos, but also traces of an invisible presence: someone lived here, loved here, dreamed here.
Like the light of stars reaching us long after they have died, my images carry the memory of what once was.
There is a strange fascination in destruction. It draws us in as much as it frightens us, like a lingering reminder of our own mortality — a contemporary memento mori.
But it is not death that captivates me. Nor fear.
What moves me is what still seems to inhabit these places.
To photograph them is not a neutral act. It is a choice and, for me, a necessity.
Photography gives me the freedom to decide where to stand, what to reveal and what to leave outside the frame. But from that freedom comes responsibility. I do not seek the spectacle of destruction, nor do I place people in these images. I work with architecture, absence, traces and light.
The destruction is not my gesture. The photograph is.
By entering these buildings and placing my own lights within them, I do not seek to rebuild them, but to bear witness — to say: “this was.”
And in the light that finds its way through the cracks, another possibility emerges: “this could be again.”
These buildings, like the Ukrainian people, are wounded, yet standing. Cracked, yet unbroken.
They do not promise that light will always prevail. They simply show that darkness has not succeeded in extinguishing it.
Whether that light endures is not predetermined. It depends on what we choose to protect, what we are willing to rebuild, and what we refuse to abandon.
Freedom, like light, cannot be taken for granted. It survives because we choose to keep it alive.
