Object book, etching, frottage, 2024
Fate isn’t sugar, and life isn’t honey — Ukrainian proverb.
My grandmother worked as the chief economist at the Druzhba Sugar Refinery. The refinery itself underwent significant transformations throughout its history: from the refinery of Nikola Teresсhenko to a Nazi concentration camp and then to one of the leading enterprises in the region. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, like all the sugar factories in the Sumy region, it became unprofitable and turned into ruins and scrap metal. This is a story of organic disappearance, happening in parallel with the deliberate destruction of our land and our history by Russian occupiers.
My grandmother lent me a few document folders that she was using during her time at the factory. While her documentation are numbers and calculations, I am documenting the reality.
