CAMARAC

WAITING is an on-going artistic research on how architecture articulates the refugee’s experience. It began as a personal video project to reflect on my own experience three years after I fled Ukraine. Along the process I realised that, from the moment war starts, paradoxically, the common refugee’s experience is not “rushing” but “waiting”.

For this next stage of the research, we want to revisit my itinerary from Kyiv to Barcelona through the spaces I’ve had to wait in since I became a refugee.

For several weeks, I sheltered in an underground parking with my neighbours. It was a cold February, so we huddled against hot water pipes to keep warm and took turns sleeping on makeshift beds made from pallets and blankets. However, once in Barcelona, I spent endless hours each day at the Red Cross refugee centre to process paperwork and get food. I sat patiently amongst hundreds of other refugees: all of us in rows of chairs and a single table at the front, for those who held our future in their hands. These are merely two examples of how people change architecture and architecture changes people’s lives. Our idea is to draw from these contrapositions to analyse to what extent our relation to the space around us inflicts on our social interactions.

In 2014, Russian troops invaded Crimea, my first home. I was only 12 years-old. I understood what it meant to live under occupation: my language was forbidden and I couldn’t say, or think, against Russia’s official political line. My family and I were under political pressure because of our position so, after a few years, we left for Kyiv and I never returned to Crimea. I became a displaced person, a refugee within my own country.

In 2022, war came to my home again. To survive, we decided to leave Ukraine. We ended up in Spain, and although I was only 19, I was snapped out of my youth and forced to start over my life.

In 2023, I finally managed to continue my architecture studies at university, where I started developing projects of my own that combine my practice with other arts to tackle social issues and help my community. For the first time, I’m addressing my own experience. I hope it might help other refugees – not necessarily from Ukraine – deal with their pain, and non-refugees connect with us.