I WAS SLEEPING WHEN OUR HOUSE BURNED DOWN

I Was Sleeping When Our House Burned Down, repair mortar, charcoal and laser print on drywall, 33 x 60cm, 2024.

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I was walking down the street when I noticed a man in overalls, gutting a building. I asked him to save me a piece of drywall. He was tearing out the old walls, replacing them with something new. How easy is it to replace a house with something new? Our ancestral home in Makariv stood through several decades, past the collapse of the Soviet Union, only to be destroyed in an instant by a high-speed shell. Nothing remains. How easy is it to replace a memory with something new? All I see is fire…With our home gone…memory follows…memory is sensitive to destruction…it shatters in parallel…I return to what remains…I return to what can still be touched…collecting drywall and mortar from lost homes is another way in…piece by piece…I gather what has been discarded…I gather what can still be salvaged…piece by piece…I begin to rebuild the memories of home…I am confronted with what I hold onto most tightly…I press against the images that return at night…fire…embers…burning cycles that flicker through my dreams…I swallow the flames…I swallow them again…death…like memory…is not a collapse…it is a continuous transition…vitality gives way to emptiness…emptiness makes room…from that emptiness something new can emerge…again and again…I press mortar with my fingers…I fill the cracks…I stamp home until it sticks…with fire…without fire…the gesture repeats…the gesture sustains…It is as much about endings as it is about renewal: a place where grief and hope meet, and where repair becomes a lifeline.