Luhansk, My Song

Luhansk, my song is a multi-channel investigative video installation consisting of 5 to 10 short films based on the interviews with people who come from Luhansk and had to leave it due to russian invasion back in 2014.

One day, I suddenly realized that most of my friends or important people for me were originally from Luhansk. For most of them, 2014 was the time of their youth - graduation from high school, the beginning of university, and a sudden need to grow up.

The topic of their hometown and the experience of forced displacement was the only one we did not touch upon during the long years of our acquaintance. Today, like my friends, I have no opportunity to see Luhansk with my own eyes. The only way I can do this is to piece it together from different sources — online maps, found footage from different times, and stories told by my friends. Some of them recall their life in the city with a pang of nostalgia, while others would never want to return there even in their minds, and some block their feelings for the sake of their own peace of mind. But even non-complimentary descriptions and bitter memories are filled with some kind of love and cautious excitement.

Currently, the video and new interviews are in progress, and the link below shows a fragment of the first interview-memoir, which tries to create a very generalized picture of the city, sometimes using a rather critical lens, but is nevertheless a story of love and loss.

Each of the videos is a story about the city in the words of one person, presenting sometimes opposing perspectives on the city and society, illustrated with found footage and fragments of online maps. Each of the conversations touches upon different topics: the industrial background of the city and the preconditions of the russian invasion, the phenomenon of marginalization of both internally displaced persons and people who stayed in the city for various reasons; the study of Kyiv's perception of Luhansk through the contrast of news coverage on TV channels of the time; the appearance of modern society and everyday life in the occupied city — what performances are being shown to Luhansk children in the city’s circus today. The video also attempts to explore the different strategies of memory of each of the interviewees, both glorification and expulsion of the memory of the city and references to it from their lives.