Iryna Vodolazhchenko

In the digital world, a backup means the possibility of restoration. But in the case of home, memory, embodied experience, and war, this logic does not work. A home cannot be restored from an archive — it can only be partially recreated through personal experience.

In this project, I turn to the Slobozhanshchyna tradition of house painting — a practice that existed as a living, seasonal language. These paintings were often created for holidays or seasonal changes, after which the houses were whitewashed, and the paintings had to be renewed. Natural pigments faded quickly, and old images were often covered by new layers of whitewash, which is why this tradition was rarely documented.

Historically, Slobozhanshchyna house painting developed across the territories of present-day Luhansk, Poltava, Kharkiv, and Sumy regions. This example reveals how ornaments, patterns, and visual motifs migrated between regions under the influence of colonial policies and historical events in Slobozhanshchyna. In this project, this theme is also connected to my personal geography: I work in the territory of my “new” home in the Kirovohrad region, and Kharkiv region — the place where I was born and raised.

During field research in the Kharkiv and Kirovohrad regions, I collected natural materials: clay, charcoal made from oak branches after heating a stove, and plant pigments from rosehips and beetroot. From these materials, I manually produced paints and created wall paintings in houses in the villages of Novoselivka and Pryyutivka, as well as in an abandoned house in the village of Ostroverkhivka.

The selected pigments are deliberately unstable: they fade, wash away, and react to cold, humidity, and sunlight. In this project, the paintings exist as evidence of temporality.

The process of creation took place in 2025–2026 during power outages, freezing temperatures, and shelling. Some sketches were damaged but deliberately left unrestored.

The project combines embodied experience, local materials, and traditional images: the tree of life, a bird, a horse, the sun — fragments of a cultural code reinterpreted through my artistic practice.

The documentation of this process exists only as an imperfect “backup,” incomplete and vulnerable to time. It does not guarantee restoration but merely preserves a moment before disappearance.

The project also raises the question of the migration of cultural forms. The paintings historically associated with the Kharkiv region appear beyond its borders, in another region. This creates a rhetorical question: will this practice become shared by both regions? And to which “native land” will these paintings belong if researchers discover them sometime in the future?

“The Lost Backup of Home” is a reflection on the fragility of memory, home, and experience. It reflects on the understanding that not everything can be archived or restored, and on art as a gesture of presence.