Pavlo Bestuzhev
Pavlo Bestuzhev, Ukrainian media artist, illustrator and visual communication designer from Kyiv. Co-founder of the co-lab community.Due to the high probability of shelling of Kyiv, he and his family were forced to leave their homes without any belongings other than documents and a pet in the first hours of the full-scale invasion. For more than a week he has been near Vasylkiv, which is constantly under fire. He has learned to distinguish between Ukrainian and enemy fighter planes and is constantly worried that the latter may fly into his yard. The artist is constantly worried about his child, wife, niece, daughter-in-law and parents… Between sitting in the basement and the house there is only terrible news and constant thoughts about traveling further to the West. Pavlo tells us his story: “5:30, February 24 is a new starting point, when you no longer know what day it is, when all your constant routine disappears and you just count down the time, relying on faith in a better future. Everything is like a stupid dream, there is still a desire to wake up and go back to normal life. The hardest decision for me was to separate from my family. I have never been apart from my daughter for more than 10 days, and now for more than three weeks I can not hug and kiss her before bed. But I know that she is safe and that it was necessary to do so. At the moment I live in very modest conditions. As they say, we are back from the 21st century to the mid-20th, when you need to light the stove and carry water from a well, and it takes up most of the day. There is no creativity, it is as if some mechanism has broken in me. I am constantly trying to direct my emotions to creativity, but probably it’s not time yet. Maybe a little later I will create a series of works dedicated to these events, but not now. Now I have the strength only for volunteering, website hacking and support for my work team, which is now in different Ukrainian cities and other countries. But I believe that soon we will all return to the things that make us who we are.”
Interviewed by Yevgeniya Tsatsenko