i dream of the absinthium field
in collaboration with: Dalia Zhdanovskyy and Kateryna Rudenkopublished by: Ziemniaki i
2024
When reality turns horror, we need stories that can carry the load, shapeshift it and, one day, unmake it altogether. Fundacja Ziemniaki i new book publication “i dream of the absinthium field”, featuring words and images by three authors: Kateryna Rudenko, Iryna Zamuruieva and Dalia Zhdanovskyy is an attempt to reckon with this new reality. The stories in the book take classical Ukrainian folklore motives – the journey, the animated living world, the trinity of an action – and mould them into the present-day shape: murky, shimmery and eerie all at once. Each contribution in its own way tells a story that stays true to the bleak and the dark all around but also the vibrancy of the living worlds.
Findings, translating, assembling words amidst grieving the losses of the war is hard, yet there are characters, dream-like and real, that keep the authors company: the Ukrainian language teacher who flees the explosions, the neolithic horseman, who rises from the underworld and finds himself in a supermarket cereals isle, the language that may or may not be mud, Shubin who haunts the coal-fuelled terrains. The stories in the book dissent, sing, slosh through mire, climb kurgans, grieve, rumble, each goes ‘boom’ and leaves nothing unchanged.
The stories are scattered around Chernihiv, Kyiv, Cherkasy, Ternopil, Canada and Poland, the central Ukrainian steppe that upon closer inspection turns out to be field, the red sandstone cliffs, the nuclear reactor, the place under the apple tree, the underworld of Donbas oozing and rambling its way into daylight, the heart of the empire, the periphery of the empire, and the kingdom of and for the dead.
The stories also feature: a crow that upon closer inspection turns out to be a combat drone, a synthetic cannibalistic monster, a Molotov cocktail prepared in the bomb shelter, a song that stretches from your door to mine, wooden boards that upon closer inspection turn out to be a makeshift bed, a goat that may or may not be covered in coal dust, the air raid alerts on loop, the rumbling that won’t go away. And of course, there's the absinthium field in the distance.
Whether or not there will be miracles – another classical element of each proper story – or not, is yet to be determined.