Ivo Bystřičan for Ukraine

ECHOES OF THE INTERNATIONAL DOCUMENTARY FILM FESTIVAL IN JIHLAVA 

I'd rather speak in pictures than in text. The whole time I photographed the strangest combinations of yellow and blue in public space. As if other colors were running out. The bridge has a blue railing but yellow columns. The lamp on the street has a yellow pole, the bulb cover is blue. The car is all yellow, but the door is blue. There are dozens of such phenomena on each street. Blue roof, yellow ridges. Blue door, yellow handle. How you can play with just two colors. A kind of concrete plinth is blue, but it’s peeling off and in various maps the yellow background color shines through. Very refined, as if the painter worked with the concept of time and let it forever create abstract shapes in the colors of Ukraine. For me, Ukraine is exactly that. It is changing in front of me and creating new and new shapes constantly. Something is peeling off and something new will appear. A new contour in thoughts, new reliefs of reflections. Every time I visit Ukraine, something new shines through. This time, for me, it's the reciprocity of people when I think about what makes a country a country. It’s not the colors. If the ridges were green and the lamps were red, Ukraine would be no less Ukraine. I walk around the Dnieper here in Kherson, around the modest neighborhoods and I think it's just mutual solidarity, respect, helpfulness, whether to the neighbor next door or the abstract one or even someone unknown – but even on the outside, not only in the tribe of people painted the same color – it makes the country a place to live. It starts with each of us and neither the government nor the business nor the international institutions can arrange it. I feel this desire for reciprocity in Ukraine, and the blue and yellow street games are perhaps its symbolic framework.