The war Ukraine – Russia / Summary of my 6 months on the front line.
What is home? How to define it? Is it land, a wall, a building or close people, family traditions and dreams? Or maybe each of these elements is necessary to be able to say – “here is my home”?
Sebastian Płocharski: “On February 24, 2022 at 5 am I was inundated with messages from my friends in Ukraine. They informed me that they were under Russian bombs and they were terrified. On that day, total war broke out, Russia invaded Ukraine. All internet headlines turned red. The world remembered Ukraine. Even though we had expected this for months, we embraced the reality we had all witnessed in disbelief. I posted a post on Facebook in which I informed that I was looking for memory cards, HDDs and power banks needed to work during the armed conflict. I announced that I was going to Kiev. At 2 p.m. I was on my way to Kiev together with three other journalists from Poland. Andrzej, a Kiev theater director who had lived in Toruń for several years, was also traveling with us – he wanted to enlist in the army. There was a very tense and surreal atmosphere. This is how I started my way to the war, during which I was to spend the next 6 months, becoming a war correspondent for Polish and British media. “
The “Rhythm of Survival” series is a photographic and film record of Sebastian Płocharski’s intimate and very personal journey, which he traveled as a journalist and social documentary filmmaker. He was not only an artist who watched the situation passively – he participated and became a natural part of it. For the last 6 months he has also worked as a volunteer and coordinator of the evacuation actions of the Donbas residents and humanitarian aid in eastern Ukraine. He has been interested in the subject of the war in Donbas for 8 years. He went there for the first time in 2015, making reportages, documentary films and often abstract forms of artistic storytelling, which were to draw attention to the situation of the civilian population in the war zone. In 2020, he covered the so-called “Demarcation lines” or the border between Ukraine and two unrecognized separatist republics, the LPR and the DNR. He portrayed the forgotten inhabitants of the war zone, the aim of which was to draw attention to the humanitarian crisis of this region. As he says himself, his work has no documentary value – it is very intimate and personal. After spending several years in Donbas, he admits that it has also become his home.
Sebastian Płocharski – Torunian, living in Glasgow. Photographer, documentary filmmaker, visual artist, storyteller. Member of the British Association of Journalists. A scholarship holder of the President of Toruń in the field of culture. He devoted the last 8 years of his life to the development of independent social activism in the areas of humanitarian deprivation in Donbas and in the world under the name MakeCoffeeNotWar.info.
Media patronage: Radio Gra Toruń
photos: Maciej Wasilewski / Gazeta Wyborcza
