Nadya Sayapina:

There is a white sheet of paper in front of me. Inside me, there are lots of words and images I would like to express and transform into a letter. I want to write so that I am understood and nothing is distorted. But multiple views and perceptions can create as many interpretations as there are readers. Sometimes I get scared thinking that my words can be twisted and hurt other people. But I cannot refrain from writing because writing means not losing connection with those who are not with me, letting everything out, reliving it and looking at it from outside. On a sheet of paper, I can at least imagine I got back what I lost – my home. I write my own letters and collect those of others, forming them into a long archive of various experiences and stories. When I think why I keep writing, I understand that I still hope to get an answer.

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• The project by artist Nadya Sayapina Letter to Mom turns to the stories of people who urgently left Belarus and now are building their lives in new places. The project is based on thirty interviews of Belarus immigrants the artist was collecting for several months. The project reveals an emotional side of displacement experience: personal feelings, the sense of losing home, helplessness and confusion, fear, uncertainty, and the feeling of guilt. The final part of the research was Letter to Mom exhibition in the Small Gallery of Mystetskyi Arsenal. The exhibition spaces presented a view on common and varying things that the participants lived through. The artist turned to drawings, performances and installations through which the audience could feel and relive the emotions experienced by project participants. The exhibition part of the project also included participation in the framework of which locals were offered to look at interview fragments and create letters and drawings to be sent home on behalf of displaced Belarusians. Through such practice the artist appeals to joint lived experience of painful circumstances and to empathy as a possibility to engage in a dialogue.The result of the project is Letter to Mom exhibition held in the Small Gallery of Mystetskyi Arsenal. The exhibition curator is Natasha Chichasova. The project was implemented in the framework of residence in Mystetskyi Arsenal with the support of Goethe-Institut in Ukraine.