Exclusion zone

I’m of immigrant descent with my DNA consisting of Italian and Ukrainian. My ancestors had to flee Europe

due to pogroms and war, the most recent being in 1945.

I was always curious about what people filled their suitcases with,

what they left behind and what they took with them.

One travels with memories, photographs, with light/heavy or small/big objects…

―“Everyone found a justification for themselves, an explanation. I experimented on myself. And basically I found out that the frightening things in life happen quietly and naturally. Zoya” ―
―“There are memories and images that flash through my mind. The chairman of the collective farm wanted two trucks to evacuate his family and all their things, their furniture. The Party organizer asked for one for himself, demanding fair play. Meanwhile...
... for many days, and I was a witness to this, they were unable to evacuate small children, a nursery group, because of the shortage of transport. And here’s this man who can’t cram all his household junk into two trucks: his three-litre jars of jams and pickles, even. I saw them loading it up the next day“ ― Sergei Gourin

…but they can’t transport their house.

Sometimes it’s not within your control when you need to leave, sometimes people are forced to leave

without warning, without thinking, without doing proper logistics…

Empty spaces where there was at some point life, energy, dreams or even problems and now all that is

gone. Everything built, dreams, effort, work, just gone in a blink of an eye.

Hence, questions like “who lived there?”, "why did he leave such or such a thing?”are mind

blowing trip to the past...

Questions that feed the imagination as well as curiosity.

The previous photos were taken in 2015, in l'Aquila, Italy, in the aftermath of the 2009 quake and 2016 in

Pripyat, Ukraine inside the Tchernobyl exclusion zone.

Quotes are from the book: Tchernobyl voices, by 2015 Nobel prize winner Svetlana Alexievitch