What happened next: the Maidan uprising in 2014, the annexation of Crimea by Russia, the war in eastern Ukraine, the downing of flight MH17, the Russian invasion in 2022. “Debaltseve was bombed in January 2015. There is almost nothing left of it. I couldn’t go there anymore. In this way, world history constantly entered my search, while my project was not political at all. I wondered: should I still continue, under these circumstances? As if someone is waiting there in times of unrest and war for a photographer who goes in search of her roots.”
Their lives, their struggle
Versluis decided to travel to Kyiv in 2016 to scatter her grandmother’s ashes in the Dnieper. “A symbolic act, the river flows all over the country, at least somewhat close to my grandmother’s hometown in the south.” And she decided to give her project a different twist: “I contacted people who had fled Debaltseve in 2015 and had built a new life elsewhere, initially in other cities in the Donbas, after February 2022 also outside Ukraine.”
Between 2017 and 2018, Versluis followed three families who had to reshape their lives. Natalia who leaves with her husband Zhenya and their children to another city, sets up a pole dance studio there and eventually ends up in Poland. Svetlana’s family who fled Debaltseve during fierce firefights, in which her husband was seriously injured, and now live in Kharkiv. Oksana, who eventually ends up in Slovakia with her sons via Transcarpathia and Lviv.