Series - FotoSlovo 2026 - Category « Fine Art »

In the photographic project Another Sense of Safety, I explore how the body experiences rupture, how a temporary loss of subjectivity occurs, and how time forms a new presence. This work is not about returning to a former sense of safety, but about adapting to a new reality in which anxiety becomes woven into the line of life.

At the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, residents of the village of Stari Petrivtsi in the Kyiv region placed mannequins in the forest. I used to walk there often, but after the invasion it became dangerous to enter. Once the territory was demined, I returned and encountered them.

They stood and lay among the trees — white, dressed, unnaturally calm, empty. Something shifted inside me. A space that had always felt protective suddenly became unsettling.

The forest had been my place of silence and refuge, yet the appearance of these artificial bodies disrupted its integrity. The mannequins resembled a presence without life, traces of someone who had disappeared. Where I once felt protection, fragility emerged. The forest became a field of perception where every form could be read as a signal. In this environment, the mannequins appeared as bodies after the loss of subjectivity, reflecting a state of depersonalization in which the psyche distances itself to endure an excess of reality. The artificial was invading the living.

I returned repeatedly, observing how moisture darkened the plastic, how wind bent and stripped them, how snow concealed their forms. Gradually, nature absorbed them into the landscape.

My perception changed. The threat did not disappear, but it softened. Anxiety stopped being a peak and became a layer — just as the mannequins ceased to disturb and became part of the forest.