slow numbers

'2022-2025 This project is a visual and textual narrative about loss — of connection, place, and presence. It was born out of a personal experience of forced displacement, of losing a native city and a familiar way of life. Through a series of photographs taken on Polaroid film and handwritten notes, I document not only the external changes, but also the internal shift — the rupture with someone close, with whom I shared years of friendship, traditions, and common roots. Since 2014, I had a tradition of traveling to Lviv every spring to meet a close friend. We were both born in Donetsk, which was occupied that same year. After the war began, she moved to Lviv, and I to Kharkiv. Lviv became a meeting point, a city of reunions, a brief return to peaceful times. Our walks through the streets, breakfasts in cafés, shared memories — all of it created a space where we could feel stability, if only for a moment. In 2022, I arrived in Lviv again — this time fleeing constant shelling in my second home, Kharkiv. But the city had changed. Many familiar people had left the country, others had joined the army. This project attempts to capture the moment when the familiar becomes foreign. When people disappear from your life, perhaps not forever, but the place for reunion remains undefined. "Slow Numbers" is a diary in which I calculate the probability of encountering a familiar face — or at least the silhouette of someone I once knew: a neighbor from my parents’ apartment, an old friend, a classmate. But the farther you are from home, the less likely it is. The empty windows of buildings stare back at me with quiet arrogance, while I sit with scraps of paper, trying to calculate the probability of such a meeting.