Why did you accept a non-conventional installation for your photos at the Fondazione Imago Mundi exhibition?

I just try to make art through photography and I love any new way of showing my art. Paper is good if you sell pictures, but if you make some exhibitions there are too many ways of doing it and if somebody proposes me some experiment like it happened with FIM for me it’s a next level and also a new way to see my pictures. 

In your interviews, you often say that you think it’s important to show not only the tragedy in a picture, but also the metaphysical view. Why is that so relevant to you? What do you want to convey with that?

Before the war, I used to read maybe four books per month, mostly about West and East philosophy. For me philosophy is not finding answers. Rather it’s important that somebody asked the same questions that I ask myself a thousand years ago. And it’s important that philosophy doesn’t talk necessarily about the present moment, but generally. I find something similar in my pictures. We recently made an exhibition in Korea and somebody came to me and told me that the pictures from 2014 Maidan revolution looked like the French Revolution. That’s the point. In my photos I try to clean everything so that people feel something which they can relate to. If I do just some patriotic work about Ukrainian present, after a couple of years this is not going to stay interesting for people and for me either. So I try to find some main questions for the whole idea of History. It’s true that with Ukraine is a bit more difficult for me because there is still a patriotic element inside of me, but for the 2014 revolution, for instance, I didn’t care about showing who were the good ones and who the bad ones, it was just two cultures confronting each other. That’s why I covered both fronts, I stayed both with the protesters and with the police and that’s why I called the project “Culture of confrontation”. 

Can you give my some examples of your pictures where you see this metaphysical aspect more evident?

My picture changed because my philosophy changed. I changed my point of view. I spent my last years in Asia meditating around 15 hours per day. I think that this world doesn’t need humans, or at least countries. Sometimes when you’re taking pictures of objects, like some artillery or destroyed trees in the forest, you may realize that we’re here temporarily. We, as a nation or as a people, are destroying our lands and our cities and the question is why? For what reason? People fight because of nationalism, because of religion, because of border. But what means border? If you know history, you know borders change many times and will change in the future. Why people should fight and protect this border? The same thought relates to my art. I know that in thousands years, no one will notice about my art. I don’t cover war because I’m patriotic, I do it for many reasons, like covering History. But we do things basically because we like doing it and for me photography is like a visual diary. If I feel something, I just take a picture and sometimes I even cannot understand it. And only after selecting pictures I try to understand and for me it’s like an inner communication with my mind. When I do it for me pictures are like a sort of meditation. I walk alone, I just prefer not to be with other photographers, I stay a couple of hours in one place, listen to the sound, look for a certain light, come back many times etcetera. So it’s like some kind of meditation and maybe it’s because in this moment humans are not important. With my work I try to destroy my own ego, as well as cutting all connections with concepts like success, money, competition, nation and religion. After war, I plan to go back to travelling, visiting other countries and I know I will be forgotten here in Ukraine. For me it’s important to document History now, but I don’t care about being a famous photographer. I just want to do what I like with my wife, have some connections with nature and also with humanity because we’re social animals. But I also want to live my life only based on the present. Because life is now.

What does your work say about the Ukrainian national fortitude or the Ukrainian nation? What’s your current thoughts about the Ukrainian people that the war made you realize? What did this war teach you about your own people?

Of course everyone was so surprised that Ukrainian men could resist Russian power. Putin made a huge mistake because he basically reunited the whole nation, he built a strong nation again. The war makes sense for us now because we necessarily have to protect our land, but we didn’t want this war. We have no choice, we just can’t evacuate 45 millions of people to Europe. I also think the answer has more to do with a nation in war than with Ukraine itself. Ours is not a unique situation and people try to extrapolate an heroic element from normal situations. Every young country if attacked or invaded would resist. A nation is like a human, it evolves. Every country fights for independence, like Germany fought with France. Now we just fight for our own independence and try to be a country not part of some other empires. And of course it’s because we are young, so if we were an old nation like Italy, maybe our mindset would have been different. 

The exhibition’s title is “War is over! Peace has not yet begun”. We are more than one year into this war and you’ve been covering the Ukrainian-Russian conflict since 2014. Do you still believe in peace? After having watched so much hatred, when do you think peace will start?

In 2014 there was a revolution between two different cultures: one part of the people in Ukraine had nostalgia about the Soviet Union or Russian empire and another one wanted to be an independent country and part of European Union. Now, in my opinion it’s a huge fight between Russia and Nato (or America and Europe), although only Ukrainian people and Russian people are killed. In our country we cannot control when we can stop, we cannot decide which area we may liberate because we don’t have weapons. We have people. So America and European countries decide which weapons they send to us and this means they decide which part of the country we can liberate, not our President. It’s not an Ukrainian decision. They can say that they send us only 10 tanks and that must be enough to liberate only one city. Everybody, even soldiers, understand this. We do not ask to destroy Russia or to kill Putin, we just want to liberate our cities and villages to go back to hour hometowns. We don’t have choice. Ukrainians, and Russians as well, are exhausted. Russia believes that the fight is not against Ukraine, but against the collective West. Ukraine is a buffer zone between Russia and Europe and sometimes for me it feels likes nobody wants to finish this war as soon as possible, especially America. I’m sure if America and European Union want to stop this war, they can do it in a couple of weeks or months. I think Nato once was created also to guarantee peace in this area and we sent our nuclear weapons to Russia signing the Budapest Memorandum. At that time, Great Britain, America and Russia promised to protect us if some other countries started a war again. Why can’t we just create some systems ensuring this solution? At the end, I think this war as any other war will finish with the signing of some piece of paper. Meaning, there’s going to be a compromise anyway.

And maybe Nato wants to impose a division like between North and South Korea. But I think Ukraine’s aim is to liberate the whole occupied area.

Interview was conducted on 12th March 2023

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PHOTO CREDITS

1.
Maxim Dondyuk, from the series Culture of Confrontation, 2013-14

2.
Maxim Dondyuk, from the series Ukraine’22, 2023

3.
Installation view War is over! Peace has not yet begun, 2023, Fondazione Imago Mundi, Ph. Marco Pavan.

4.
Maxim Dondyuk, from the series Between Life and Death, 2017

5.
Maxim Dondyuk, from the series Culture of Confrontation, 2013-14