There's so much war documentation that it does not impress you as before. Digital photography, film photography, color and black and white, printed or composed in various tricky ways. Grief, blood, destruction, death, pictures of battles. It seems you cannot increase the tension further.

Keeping that in mind, for a long time, I was looking for a form in which I wanted to show my photos taken on the outskirts of Chernihiv and in the nearby villages where heavy combats took place, and almost every building was destroyed or damaged by rashists' shellings. I wanted my photos not to shout at the viewers and not shock them with cruel pictures of war but still prompt them to think about the suffering the Russian invasion brought to the ordinary people. I began collecting objects in places where I took pictures, with no specific purpose at first. But later, I realized I wanted to use them in my photos, so their very presence on the surface of photography becomes Barthes's punctum that urges the wish for reflection. 

I ground to dust the parts of the found objects, made pigments, and painted the prints. A few colors were used, but I decided to make red the main tone since it's traditionally considered to be a color of war. 

There are no people in the frame, only remains of what once were their houses, belongings, and lives. The distancing from a specific person widens the view to the scale of everyone touched by the war. Also, it appeals to the viewer's personal experience in the silence that remains alone after the thunder of battles.

Gelatin silver prints, 30x30 cm. Bricks and soot of destroyed houses, rust from the burned down cars and shrapnel from shells, paint from the zinc boxes of Russian ammunition, sand from the graves of civilians who died during the siege of Chernihiv.