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Donbas is a heavily industrial region in the East of Ukraine, which since spring 2014 has a war raging on its territory. In order to escape the war (just according to official statistics on the 31st of August 2015) 1 145 645 families from Donbas and Crimea had to move to other cities and villages in Ukraine. And while many people in different places of Ukraine have been very welcoming and willing to help, at the same time there are still stereotypes and prejudices existing within Ukrainian society, when it comes to perceptions of Donbas and its people. These stereotypes and prejudices manifest themselves through indifference, through language attacks, through refusals to rent apartments or to offer jobs…
With “Donbas Odyssey” we wanted to destroy a generalized image of Donbas and its people by taking a discussion away from a political discourse and bringing it onto a personal level.
Project authors: Darya Tsymbalyuk, Julia Filipieva and Victor Zasypkin, have conducted in-depth interviews with internally displaced persons from the East of Ukraine. During these interviews people who used to live in Donbas have drawn mental maps of places which they had to abandon. These maps have frozen cities and villages of Eastern Ukraine in a state, in which they had been before the beginning of military actions, a state, in which they stayed in the memory of people. This project is a certain journey to Donbas, which is made possible through personal stories of people.
Ukraine’s Hidden Tragedy 