Clemens Poole

Looted by Russian occupational forces between 24 and 26 October 2022, the Kherson Museum of Local Lore used to house Southern Ukraine's largest and oldest collections of antiquities. The museum featured more than 173000 objects, spanning seven thousand years, from Scythian gold to World War II weaponry. Two weeks before Kherson was liberated by the Ukrainians, Russian occupational forces enacted a strategic theft, stripping centuries of Ukrainian history from the museum/region. The sound of shellings and missile strikes was recorded during filming inside the museum on December 12, less than two kilometers away from russian-occupied territory.

Film uses archival footage and semi-historical narrative to weave a complex exploration of identity, culture, and the power of archives in contemporary Ukraine. The video follows a young boy's 1995 outing with his family in Luhansk in eastern Ukraine (occupied by Russian proxy forces since 2014), while the adult voice of the child narrates his story from the present. His voice, however, is not his own. The story that he tells about Ukraine and Luhansk is explicitly framed as a narrative perceived by an American artist whose grasp of the situation is subject to media sensationalism, dramatic flourishes, and personal fetishism. Ultimately the film undermines its own authorship and our engagement with its drama, while also producing the story of a child who becomes a hero in a nation searching for hope.