An existential crisis that begins with the death of someone close. Alongside the good things we learn in childhood, we also learn that one day we will die. This is one of the crises every child goes through -  at some early point, somewhere between laughter and games, you suddenly realize that you will die, and that your parents will die too.

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In the first part of the film series Decalogue by the Polish director Krzysztof Kieślowski, there is a dialogue between a father and a son. The son asks what death is, and this moment most likely reflects one of his first conscious encounters with the idea of death.

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“Nothing serious. It’s just… I was so happy in the morning when I managed to calculate everything correctly, and then a pigeon came to eat the breadcrumbs; but later I went to the shop and saw a dead dog. I knelt down next to it and said to myself: what is the point of all this? Who needs the information about how long it takes Miss Piggy to catch Kermit?
It makes no sense at all.”

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It is precisely this dialogue that I want to use as an example when speaking about the “place of encounter” -  the place where we meet death. Some places become sacred because we commemorate and honor memory there; others do not become sacred, depending on cultural attitudes toward death.

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Thus, the place of encounter becomes a cemetery of Ukrainian soldiers - very recent graves, some only a few days old, others up to a year. On the plaques are birth dates from the year 2000 - people of the same age as the author.

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In this moment, the author becomes that boy and asks you: so what is the meaning here?

In this research, Kateryna observes attitudes toward death and its sacredness -  or the absence of it — as a form of collective unity and ritual in the experience of shared feeling.

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This is an ongoing project that Kateryna is still in the process of researching and developing.