A bucket, a basin and a flooded house: Preserving Kherson’s memory through war

Rebuilding a lost house from photographs

When the Kakhovka dam was destroyed in June 2023, floodwaters swept through Oleshky, a Russian-occupied town in southern Ukraine. Among the buildings inundated was the home of Polina Raiko, a self-taught Ukrainian artist who had transformed nearly every surface of her modest house into vivid, fantastical murals.

Afanasieva had spent years documenting Raiko's work. After the flooding, she appealed to anyone who had photographed the murals to send her their images, adding them to an archive assembled by her Kherson-based creative studio Totem. The photographs became the basis for an art book, Polina Raiko. Invisible.

Now the archive may help reconstruct something much larger. Because the rooms were too small to photograph entire painted walls at once, Afanasieva and her colleagues are piecing together multiple images "like puzzles" to create a detailed digital reconstruction of Raiko's house. Their hope is that one day it could be restored — or recreated at full scale as an installation visitors could walk through.

For Afanasieva, preserving Raiko's house is about more than saving an unusual work of folk art. Raiko began painting after losing her husband, daughter and son, filling the empty house with fantastical birds, flowers, animals and other figures.

"She was an ordinary woman who learned to turn her pain and loss into beauty," Afanasieva said. "Her art began after she lost her entire family and was left alone in an empty house. She began filling that emptiness with her art."

That idea - preserving loss without allowing it to become only a story of destruction - runs through much of Afanasieva's work since Russia's full-scale invasion.

A bucket and a basin

While Kherson was under Russian occupation in 2022, Afanasieva began collecting ordinary objects for a future museum of the city's resistance. Each came with a story she believed should become part of its collective memory.

One was an old plastic bucket belonging to Kherson volunteer Hryhorii Yanchenko. Using a wheelchair, he moved through a city market collecting donations for the Ukrainian military, with residents dropping money into the bucket. According to Afanasieva, even some Russian soldiers contributed, apparently believing he was collecting money for himself.

"So I begged him to give me that bucket," she said.

And then there is the basin.

It stood filled with water beside the desk of Kherson journalist Dementii Bilyi as he reported on Russia's attempts to stage a referendum on annexing the occupied region. His phone contained photographs from polling stations and the texts he was writing - evidence that could put him in danger if Russian forces found it.

The basin was his emergency plan: if Russian soldiers broke through the door, he could immediately throw the phone into the water.

Afanasieva and her colleagues have documented these and other objects and their stories online in Ukrainian and English. They have also published a book, Museum of Resistance: 20 Objects from Kherson, which Afanasieva has presented to European partners - including Britain's Princess Anne during her visit to Kyiv.

‘We cannot show the world only our grief’

For Afanasieva, preserving Ukraine's wartime memory does not mean simply documenting destruction - especially when speaking to audiences abroad.

"People abroad are tired of our war," she said. "And it is no longer the only war in the world."

She believes Ukrainian cultural projects should instead help restore the country's cultural agency: showing that Ukrainian culture is not an extension of Russian culture, and preserving the history and heritage that Russia has sought to appropriate or erase.

"If we only show Europeans our grief and our ruins, we have to remember that they have already developed an immunity to it," Afanasieva said.

That also shapes what she believes artists should not do. Afanasieva said her main taboo is exploiting the war itself - creating work designed primarily to evoke sympathy or fit expectations of what Ukrainian wartime art should look like.

A project, she said, must first have value as art and remain true to the artist's own philosophy.

"When someone simply paints bloodied Ukrainian women in flower wreaths because those paintings will get them into an exhibition about Ukraine, it simply hurts me to look at such projects," she said.

For Kherson, Afanasieva wants something different. She hopes the city will eventually have a museum of resistance built not around piles of shell casings, but around stories, objects and immersive spaces. One planned room would place visitors virtually among the Kherson residents who took Ukrainian flags to Freedom Square and faced Russian forces during the occupation.

"I am sure that we will all be able to turn the pain of our losses into beauty," she said.

This article was produced with the support of the Fund for Local Cooperation of the Embassy of Finland in Ukraine.