21/12/2017
Lyalya’s Journey
As I travel around Ukraine I document peoples lives and their thoughts and my own new experiences in this complicated country. In 2010 I began a performance art project called “How to be a real Ukrainian” and began to video record and photo document my experiences. While blogging on Kyiv’s Independent Square in December 2013, during the early days of the Ukrainian ‘Euromaidan’ Revolution, I discovered that there were hardly any English language journalists documenting or reporting what was happening. I began learning how to tweet and video stream (my experiments you will see on the page) and volunteered for a small online broadcasting station called Spilno TV for their International channel. Inspired by this experience I decided to set up my own online TV channel that would be an outlet for my films and possibly a place to broadcast the short videos I had made.
As an artist, I felt I needed to approach the task using my own methods and unique style, which a process that is ongoing.
One thing that is important to me is that the video shows the truth and is genuine, not a product of film training (as I have had very little). But something that comes from intuition and a deeper place of understanding.
It has been a path with many surprises and difficulties and documenting very private and personal experiences turned out to be harder than I thought.
By the end of 2014, I was physical and mentally exhausted and traumatized, ending up being driven away from the Independence Square in an ambulance. After an extended period of recovery and reflection in California (where I was born), three years later, I have returned to the project and have started to edit the hours of footage. I owe it to the brave people of Ukraine to finish these films and to get them online and out into the world, so other people can also see what I have seen and maybe answer the question “who are Ukrainians? And what is this country Ukraine?