In her conversation with K2.0, she explained how eight years ago she started talking about the war through publishing a graphic novel based on her conversations with her mother, Strawberry (as she named her in her work), who at the time was living in her house in Russian-occupied eastern Ukraine. Eight years later, Kakhizde is experiencing first-hand some of the same things her mother had been telling her about: the shellings, the fear and bravery, the dark anticipation of what might happen next.

K2.0: In 2014, you participated in Manifesta 10 in St. Petersburg, Russia with your work Where the Wild Things Are. A lot has changed in the world since. What has changed in you as an artist?

Alevtina Kakhizde: In 2014, I started to talk about war, and I am still stuck there. I didn’t decide to talk about this war, but it is impossible to avoid it. It’s like avoiding reality. In St. Petersburg was the beginning of everything. It’s amazing that they invited me. I met with Kasper König [the curator of Manifesta 10], and he said, ‘What do you think, when will the war be over?’ I said, ‘I will send you a postcard when it’s over.’

No one knows. Who can say? What will happen? And in Manifesta 10, it was the time when everything started for Ukraine. We had a hybrid war, at the time Ukraine was struggling, saying to the world that we have a Russian invasion. No one believed us at the time. I was talking about this because look, my mom was living over there, in occupied territory and I phoned her every day and she told me whatever she could see, and I created a graphic novel. And then she died at a checkpoint, in 2019. The beginning of the 360° film [featured at Manifesta] is near the grave of my mom. I didn’t go to the place where she died. The body was brought to me and I buried her in the village where I live now. And you saw the grave, and the grave is actually the house she did not want to leave because it was her life.

When someone asked you why you didn’t get your mom out, you said, “what is she, furniture?”

It was the question for many Ukrainians. Because people decided to stay under occupation and it was such a hard issue for Ukrainians for eight years. Some really did not understand how they could survive but some had close relatives there. I had my mom, we talked a lot about this and she made her decision to stay over there.

This is why when my friends ask me why I didn’t take her… It was obvious, how can I go and take her, because she is not a piece of furniture, she is a person, she has her own right to decide where to live. Of course, it was clear that all her life was there. The house kept her, the garden and the land and everything was so important for her. And then, since I could not actually bury her over there, near her house, I decided to bring the house to the cemetery, where I decided to bury her, and I symbolically shift the house to the place where she actually is now.

In the movie, as you are sitting near your mother’s grave, you say ‘this is my room, this is my bedroom.’ What does that mean?

I created this grave, this memorial, and people really liked it, because so many Ukrainians they knew, their parents couldn’t really live in the area under occupation and they died under occupation, lonely, without help, like it happened with my mom… the ambulance could not go… everything because of the war. So this is the story that I started in Manifesta 10, the war just started, and now I am eight years older. I’ve experienced everything that my mom told me about.

What was it like to translate into art everything your mom was experiencing?

In the beginning, it was easy, it helped because when you share things it gives you energy. But then it becomes like a duty and sometimes it’s so hard being in this process when you call mom and she doesn’t answer. I still did this, and to a certain point of course I showed the work to my mom.

Many people asked whether I was instrumentalizing my own mom in order to tell my story in art. I asked her, look, whatever I did, here is the book, here are the animations, the drawing, the text, so please look and I am going to walk my dog and I will be back in three hours. And then she said, I’d like to take it with me, to show it to my friends in the occupied territory. She was very brave.

I was just listening to her, she needed to tell me these things. And I had to know what was happening to her. I was reporting for five years. It was very important to be honest. I was putting it all on Facebook. Then I took everything off Facebook because I had these files for five years, and I was afraid that Facebook would not work or somebody would ban my account. The files are a document that tells me what happened day by day. Even now, when I am reading this I am amazed how things were in parallel between what my mom was hearing in the market and the kind of propaganda that existed there.

I was documenting how people were talking, and of course, they could be wrong, they could say stupid things but it was how things were talked about from the perspective of an old lady.

Alevtina Kakhizde: In Ukraine, artists went to the frontline

Ukrainian artist participating in Manifesta 14 talks art and war.

Aulonë Kadriu

Alevtina Kakhizde: In Ukraine, artists went to the frontline

Ukrainian artist participating in Manifesta 14 talks art and war.

Aulonë Kadriu