postcards from Kiev (2022-in progress)

In September, I began a correspondence with Julia, a Ukrainian woman who fled to Italy in March 2022, bringing with her a handmade box containing nine birds, her extended family. Our brief acquaintance, which lasted only one summer, continued after her repatriation in September through a dense whatsapp correspondence. The account of her seemingly mundane daily life is shot through with the shadow of war, rationed electricity, improvised and often dangerous heating, air-raid alarms and escapes to shelters or out of town, and finally the discovery of the impossibility for her birds (and thus for her) to cross the border again. The project I titled “Birds are not allowed to cross the border” is meant to reflect on the issue of modern conflicts and the idea of borders; it is a narrative of war made through the voice of a young woman from Kiev. It was natural for me to integrate it with the work on grief and memory started in Latvia during an artistic residency in 2022 “White blossoms”.

I have created 14 prototypes of Julia’s birds and printed 3,000 postcards that are traveling around the world. Birds are not allowed to cross
the border became part of the European SPORES project and was first exhibited at the Goethe-Institut in Rome in March 2023.