Start Over
June 18, 2022
Start Over consists of a series of double-exposure black and white photos shot in Sevastopol, Crimea, and a performance.
While living in Sevastopol, Crimea (2007-2014), the artists were surrounded by the cult of dying on the battlefield. It led them to reflect on meaningful interconnection between two of the most often seen places in the city: spectacular monuments installed in the honor of war and soldiers’ cemeteries.
The artists merged two film layers, combining photos of military armaments at the memorials to the wars of the 19th and the 20th centuries in Crimea with the graves of soldiers killed in those wars.
The project’s second part is a performance consisting of the artists placing the manually printed images on the tablet and destroying their content by covering the photographs with a special chemical solution. The live audience was able to observe the dissolving traces of the military equipment and the graves.
To metaphorically erase the cult of death and traces of war from our memory, and start with a clean slate, artists appealed to the mythologem of “dead” and “alive” water according to the Slavic mythology. Accordingly, artists used “dead” water first in order to clean the wounds from the past, and then use “alive” water for a new and peaceful life. In front of the audience the photo paper sheets first looked like they had bloody traces, and then gradually became clean and white.
Start Over is a performative healing ritual act that cleanses the collective memory and mind of bloody memories and artificial cults of war and death.
The photographs were taken in 2012, in anticipation of war that was, indeed, evoked by its constant symbolic honoring. Crimea was occupied by The Russian Federation in the beginning of 2014; the war in the Donbas region of Ukraine (the homeland of the artists) started afterwards. The genocide of the Ukrainian people that started on 24th of February 2022 shows how strong the cult of destruction remains.
