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- Neanderthal Fabric
Anna Kostomarova
The grid of streets in my hometown is disappearing from memory.
What were the names of the streets that the war erased from the map?
I try to catch memories with nets.
To tie knots in order to remember.
Who am I?
Which traditions are mine?
To avoid difficult ethnic questions, I turn to universal human traditions—those that existed even before Homo sapiens.
And I twist rope using Neanderthal technology.
Anna Kostomarova is a Ukrainian artist and the author of the research-based artistic project #workrafting.
She was born in 1990 in Avdiivka, Donetsk region, Ukraine.
By education, she is a commodity expert and customs specialist. She moved to Kyiv at the beginning of the war in 2014.
Her artistic practice exists at the intersection of active observation, ethnobotany, experimental material studies, and craft. Plant materials used in her works are either grown by the artist herself or collected during long walks, inviting nature from outside into interior spaces.
Kostomarova reconstructs archaic labor techniques of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens to create contemporary objects of design and gallery-based projects enriched with scientific context.
Her authorial project #workrafting explores the interaction between humans and landscape, local resources, biodiversity, and bodily experience through material. Her research interest is geographically connected with the Trakhtemyriv Peninsula.