SASHA SHEVCHENKO



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With shadows you are as much in control of them as you are not. And two things that were very clear combine to become something completely other. 

But once our eyes have construed pattern, is there really any going back? 

Does it really matter, the name of their owners? 




@lyusterko

NEWSLETTER

TEXT ARCHIVE

Long after us bitches came to make a world of it, Queen Katyusha, blistered hands, the

Homo Sovieticus, all came to make a play of Ukraine. The first dogs were already the last

dogs. But the grain grew and dried, mounds asphalted and cracked. Slavic from Neww

Jeerrssayy first stroked my pregnant belly and then he didn’t. My fur is ancient. But nothing

is the same or longer with your grey people.

While we all try and hold on to our origin stories, however unclear they may be, I’d like to tell you this: Being a diasporic person - or simply one that navigates change, does not mean we are subjects of endings.

Perhaps this purgatory has a superpower of its own. While the threshold causes discomfort, it also invites the imagination for what once passed through it.

What will my tree of life look like? Will the roots and trunk exist in the same place? Or patched together from cloth of different origin? Perhaps it would be a plant cutting - wrapped in damp newspaper, smuggled past border agents at the airport. 

We see red when we’re angry. We paint towns with it. We tiptoe around red tape.

Arguably, no other colour has this much linguistic presence. It is the flag bearer of our deepest emotions. But beyond that, red is physical - it is a component of our very selves.

Although Nina’s sewing device did not carry a material presence in my family’s recent history, it still stands for a resolute female tradition - a manifesto — to value even a single thread, to hold it tight — so that one day, it can be used in a device, to stitch together where we are torn .