Men Think They Are Better Than Grass

This installation (which has been traveling through different landscapes - the seashore of Black Sea, a forest in Moscow region, the North Sea’s dunes in the Netherlands) is based on my family story. After the Second World War, when my mother was a kid, she lived near a park. During reconstruction works in that park, a lot of human bones were found under the trees. Local kids used them in their games. Those bones were remnants of the wars that Sevastopol went through several times.

 

I was also born and raised in Sevastopol and saw how this tragic human history and war legacy sleeps inside the beautiful nature of this region and lives in the local people’s minds. Every landscape hides a part of human memory, shadows and scars made by events that took place there. This memory dimension connects all places in the world. But in the end, the humans who consider themselves immortal and omnipotent will be absorbed by nature and become only a legend in the depths. 

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The title of the installation is a line from the poem «The River of Bees» by W. S. Merwin.