Memento mori…

Can forgetting one‘s own history, memories and physical destruction of one‘s home be equated with death? Is the “death” of a such places a natural process, when a part of the earth, changed by human labor, regains its original state?

Nature in its essence is cyclic and death is an indefeasible part of this cycle. Death – is a constant driver of evolution, part of natural selection. At the heart of the philosophical concept of eternal return is the assertion that universe has been recurring an infinite numbers of times in a self-similar forms and time is cyclic. Nietzsche affirmed that life as we live it, we will have to live one more and innumerable times more. Then a person is faced with a choice – either accept the fact that we can not change anything, or this knowledge will simply destroy us. Can such an idea undermine the sacred significance of death in religion and culture? In the global context, from the point of view of the universe – perhaps, but in the context of the individual, in the context of personal loss – death, oblivion, fading of memories will always be an important process that shapes fundamental archetypes and human values.

This series of photos is my attempt to document the history of a small village in the southern Ukraine.