Presented as part of the group exhibition A House is Not a Home, held in Antwerp at Sint-Paulusstraat, 23 in June 2025, this project emerged from a personal and enduring connection to Sevastopol — the city where I spent 18 years of my life. Now living at a distance, I continue to follow it through conversations with family, fragments of memory, and the digital traces left behind online. As war reshapes borders and narratives, this connection grows increasingly fragile. The work began as a way to remain close to a place in flux — a place whose image is constantly being rewritten.

The first room featured a grid of 100 screenshots captured from surveillance webcams that once livestreamed Sevastopol in real time. Originally installed to monitor traffic and display monuments, these cameras were taken offline around November 2022 due to wartime security concerns. The last visible frames — now frozen — evoke a city paused mid-breath. Each image was printed and mounted directly on the wall, while a projection overlaid a rotating loading sign atop every frame. This layered gesture recreated the effect of a feed that never finishes loading, working both as a still image and a moving image.

The second room displayed large-scale collages constructed from school agendas distributed during my school years. These publications, produced annually by local authorities, present an idealized image of the city. They reproduce historical photographs, military icons, and patriotic slogans — curating a theatrical vision of Sevastopol that leans toward propaganda. The agendas tell a story of civic pride, yet their staging reveals a deeper narrative about control and image-making. This space also included an audio loop of the city’s official anthem, played at all major public ceremonies.

A smaller adjoining space housed the only remaining webcam still streaming live from Sevastopol — a view from the zoo at kids entertainment park.

In the final room, a single-channel video played a sequence of blurred landscapes. These were drawn from Telegram clips published by residents during aerial raids on the city. Shared in real time, the videos had been censored by local authorities to obscure military infrastructure. What remained was sound and motion. In this final gesture, the work confronted the viewer with the tension between witnessing and erasure, between personal memory and state-controlled vision.