Unrestrained Stream of Time

“Unrestrained stream of time” (Нестримний потік часу) was the title of the first 35 mm photo I’ve taken using an old soviet camera and black and white film. Not only the camera was soviet, but also the subject of the photo, an old soviet clock that I found in my friend’s studio. Ironically enough, it said “time factory” on its face and a stream of water is pouring through it.

Fast-forward to many years later, I’m in the center of Kyiv, it is freezing cold November, and there are thousands of us. Some sleep in tents, others cater tea, coffee, and food to the volunteers and activists. Women carry tires and help gather pavement stones to help protect them from police attacks. It is Maidan and a revolution of change, demand for dignity is in the air. “No pro-russian president, no corrupt government, back to the European family”, these were our demands and our hope for the future. It was a vision of a gentle white flower blooming in front of my eyes, we all felt it, the magic of witnessing the birth of a nation. Everyone participated as much as they could, occupying the central square in tents, organizing a self-managed volunteer network, and coming each Sunday for the multimillion demonstrations to Maidan. If you smelled like a bonfire, it meant you’d just come from Maidan, where the fire was lit in big iron barrels to keep warm during cold months.

We thought they wanted to kill our spirit by a long cold winter, but in February the first shootings came. Snipers hide on the roof of the central hotel, targeting unarmored people. I rushed to the center as soon as I found out, imagining with horror finding familiar faces among the dead. I saw bodies covered by cloth next to the popular fast food restaurant, holes from bullets, and there was a crisp, heavy silence I never knew before. An old man was covering his face with rough, worker’s hands, dressed in ripped clothes, surrounded by smoke and screaming ambulance sirens, he stood alone with his grief, with our grief.

The flowers in my room started fading and slowly dying, I took photos of them, as I didn’t have any moral right to take any at Maidan. The series was called “Dead Flowers”, and hardly anyone recognizes them as “dead” when I show them. Instead of throwing them away, I watched the transformation and a new level of beauty was revealed. I took pictures of one hundred flowers, each flower for the unarmed boy or man killed by the sniper. Life, death, and transformation. If sorrow doesn’t transform us in one way or another, then life is taken for granted and deaths are in vain. What was happening in 2014 in Ukraine, on Maidan in one form or the other is happening on many squares around the globe. Human desire for freedom, country, land, culture, and respect is universal.

Streams of time are running and intensifying. From my first black and white photo to where I am today, in Berlin, away from my culture and my land, I overcame the road of painful transformation and found reward in my cultural identity. Time is not a factory, especially since it’s not a Soviet or Russian factory, and another clock in the background shows a different time.