Homeless under an Alien Rainbow

When protests started in Belarus, I worked as a journalist, collaborating with a number of foreign channels and working on my own film. I was lucky to not be arrested and really didn’t want to leave. But the repressions were only getting worse and, after a year and a half, the KGB came to search my apartment. It was then that I realized that sooner or later everyone would end up in jail. It was just a matter of time.

For a while, I continued to put off the decision to leave. Even when I was accepted into a study program at a Polish film school, I still thought I would be able to return. However, the day after my arrival in Poland, Russia attacked Ukraine, and the possibility of returning home was closed to me.

My friend Nella is a director, we studied at film school together. And when the program ended, we realized that neither of us had a plan of what to do, how to live and where to head off. We only knew that we could not return home. I started photographing my friend as a mirror reflection of my own inner state. Over time, we moved to different apartments, always continuing to support each other and living in the same city.

We only knew that we could not return home.

I first felt homeless when I went to a bank in a foreign country and was asked to write down my current address. I had nothing to put down. I used to dream of traveling everywhere, but now I feel like I am »nowhere«. Traveling comes to an end when you have nowhere to go back to.

I was searching for a way to define what home means to a person. Home as a concrete, tangible thing. Home as one’s own apartment, land, room, bed, cat, or dog. I wanted to hear the answer to this question from other people because I was struggling to define what it was that I myself had lost. My home exists physically, but without me. My home has become unsafe for me. Losing one’s home is not the same as losing one’s comfort. It is just as possible to feel homeless in an expensive hotel as it is in the cheapest hostel. You can feel homeless in an alien forest or under an alien rainbow in the sky.

In »Current Address« project, I decided to talk about homelessness through my own story. At the most difficult moment, my friend and I were left without an apartment, with nothing but a mountain of suitcases to call our own, and we decided that it would be easier to cope with our changed circumstances if the two of us stuck together. Together we moved from one temporary accommodation to another, and I started filming my friend in the places where we happened to find ourselves, searching for a place of our own and a sense of identity.

When I began shooting this project and Nella’s portraits, I realized that there could be no complete sense of the loss of home if the visual representation of »home« was not present in this story. I couldn’t go and photograph anything in Belarus, nor was I eager to use old pictures–all of them had been taken with a different feeling of life. Then I recalled the images my mother sends me. I selected the most significant ones–those featuring the places and things that I missed the most: my grandma’s house, the grave of my beloved dog, the oldest oak tree from the cemetery where my ancestors are buried, my favorite toy that had been with me for more than 30 years, and photos of my parents. After all, one can find comfort everywhere, but home is where your family lives; it is where the graves of your loved ones are.

As I sifted through the photos, selecting the ones that mattered most from dozens of them, I also gained a better understanding of myself. It turned out that not many things are actually important. Now I am certain of what is truly dear to me.

For the »Current Address« series, I paired the photographs according to their mood, so that they complemented each other. Sometimes they evoke pain, sometimes sadness, and sometimes hope.

I believe that one day I will surely return home, even if it’s straight to my village cemetery. Because the place where one is buried also matters.

This is a story about a moment in life when you lose your past but don’t see yourself in the future. All sorts of places in foreign cities suddenly begin to remind you of something from home. You are surrounded by the same friends, but you are no longer the same person you used to be back at home.

Losing home means losing the option of attending the funeral or the wedding of your loved ones, and cherishing daily hopes, that this exile will not last forever. Sometimes I am afraid of this hope, fearing that it prevents me from holding on to something and starting a new life.

Mom continues sending me photos of her everydayness: what she cooked for dinner, how they cut down the tree in the yard, what sign they hung on my school, what the sky looks like from the window of my room.

The worst thing is when you think that one day there will be no one to send photos to, and I won’t be able to return.

Interview, editing, design: Olga Bubich