ZAMEK Culture Centre

The project created by Lia Dostlieva, an artist from Ukraine who has been living in Poland for a while, juxtaposes the great Ukrainian famine with palaeontological research conducted in the area at the same time. The artist is planning to work with historical trauma and the Anthropocene. In 1933, all food products and crops in eastern Ukraine were confiscated by the military police, while people were not allowed to move. Any mention of the ongoing famine was suppressed by the totalitarian regime. The Soviet propaganda reported on new achievements in Russian technology and science. Lia Dostlieva is interested in the simultaneity of the gesture of discovering and erasing history, the coexistence of the world of nascent Soviet palaeontology, which was fascinated by the extinct worlds, and the very real worlds of living, breathing people slowly starving to death, as well as the link between the extraction of objects from the earth and burying evidence of crimes in it.

Among other things, Lia Dostlieva is the author of objects made of textiles – hybrid organisms resembling archaeological relics, which she will present at the exhibition crowning the project.