I'm still ashamed to throw away food. My grandmother told me about the Holodomor

This project emerged as a result of a visual study using post-photographic practices, dedicated to the contemporary everyday manifestations of historical traumas of the 20th century, as well as the representational possibilities of photography as a medium in presenting traumatic events.

Whenever I throw away food for any reason, I feel ashamed. There is no logical basis for this feeling - I can quite afford not to eat what I don’t want to eat, and it cannot help or save anyone. It is just leftovers on my plate - but I feel ashamed anyway.

This feeling is rooted not in logic, but rather in my post-memory (according to Marianna Hirsch’s term): as a child, my grandmother told me various stories from her life, and among other things, there were also memories of the Holodomor. And this shame for the thrown away food comes precisely from there, from the stories of how my family survived this famine.

To illustrate this and understand this feeling, for two months we documented the traces of all the food that was thrown away. Then, from this documentation, we made collages with fragments of found photographs, which contain elements of the landscape.

Why landscape? Because, unlike the traces that the famine left in our (as well as many other Ukrainians - descendants of those who survived the Holodomor) post-memory, there were no traces left in physical space - unlike the vast majority of other collective traumas that continue to exist in the landscape as a place of memory.