How Much Is Life?

After the Temple, another project on that scale was out of reach. But stopping making art was not an option either. Kurenivka chose something small and honest.

Researching the camp's own name, Yaro found an old photograph of a well near Babyn Yar marked “Kurenivka tragedy”, a reference to the 1961 mudslide that buried part of the Kurenivka district in Kyiv. The camp rebuilt that well on the playa: a simple shape, easy to see from afar, easy to build.

By day it stood as a silent marker of forgotten atrocities. At night, looking down into the well, you saw an animation: a single coin rolling through the darkest moments of the last century, the Holocaust, the Holodomor, Chernobyl and the Kurenivka mudslide, told in visual metaphors without words.

The well's depth stood for the depth of human cruelty and indifference, set against the capacity for compassion and connection. Visitors' movement around it changed the stories projected inside.

The animation never stopped at the darkness. Between the scenes the coin turned into glowing yellow forms, flickers of memory and hope. At the end a white stork picks up a branch and flies off to build a nest, and a city rises. The coin falls, spins and lands. A question appears: how much is life?

Read the 2024 chapter →Babyn Yar archive library ↗Original project page ↗

In their words

Voices