The war in Ukraine sometimes makes strange fellow travelers. That is what the former Spanish porn actress and graduate in Fine Arts Amarna Miller will think when she finds out that a Ukrainian artist is going to be inspired by her work Psychonautics Manual (2015) to collect in a project of prose, photos and poetry his experience as a volunteer in a morgue. “She represents the ErosI represent the thanatos”, explains Aleksander Krolikovski while savoring a pizza among some of his photos of tortured corpses and pools of blood. In the shadow of the warlike climate that darkens the future of his country, he wants to go beyond the antagonism between pleasure and pain. His testimony goes from the most tender feeling of solidarity to the most gory. “Sometimes I had to walk on the bodies while, inside, I was apologizing. It was terrible, there were so many…”, she says, lowering her voice to a whisper to illustrate how she was addressing them.
The artist suffered the last blows of the covid when the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, ordered the invasion of Ukraine on February 24. The military experience of this man, who declares himself a “pacifist”, is null and he soon chose to lead a team of volunteers who cooperated in various tasks, always far from the front lines. But the front has several faces. One day they required people at the mortuary, but none of those he sent was able to take on the task. This is how Krolikovski placed a new coordinator of the group and entered the morgue himself. There he remained endless days for almost a month. “The worst thing was showing the bodies to the families. I ended up seeing them as someone close to me. I felt the pain as they did. Sometimes I had to warn them: ‘He has no head’.
Weeks after that experience and with the Russian troops away from kyiv, Krolikovski gets creative when he spreads on a restaurant table the photographs he captured with an instant camera in the Vishgorod hospital morgue, north of the capital. . He takes them between his fingers as if they were cards and shows them one by one while he explains how they serve to build a bridge between modernism, postmodernism and the obscurantism of the invaded Ukraine. He dwells further on one of the first Instax pictures he took of him. Some boots appear in a simple close-up, the ones he himself uses to get into the refrigerated trailer used as backup due to the saturation of the facilities. These “blood boots”, he explains, go hand in hand with those painted in 1886 by Vincent Van Gogh and the shoes that Andy Warhol photographed a century later with his Polaroid camera, the mother of the Instax.
An accelerated and improvised course with Ukrainian and French forensic agents helps him to talk about different types of injuries and weapons. “I was very impressed by some of the bodies that came from a grave in Bucha. They came tortured, with their eyes burned, penetrated by incandescent metal. That the Russians kill you with a shot, well, but that they do that to you… I don’t understand it”, he comments. “Some types of torture not even the doctors were able to explain. They had no experience.”
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Anyone who has been to a morgue in a war zone knows that Krolikovski’s photos could be much more explicit. The reporter who listens to him better understands this distancing from the offal as he gets to know the relationship that the artist establishes with the corpses, how he humanizes them and almost transfers them to the land of resurrection. “I talked to the dead. That helped me. He felt ashamed being among them. It was something terrible. ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry…’, I repeated to them”, he comments while he imitates the gesture of walking on them without being able to avoid stepping on them. “Sometimes he would come and tell them ‘Guys, I have news. I bring you new white bags. It’s like a gift and I’m going to exchange them for the black ones’. White is better, more fashionable”. It is surprising that, said as he says it, it does not sound offensive or frivolous.
The days passed, the dead continued to arrive, the identifications and investigations into how they lost their lives continued and, at the same time, some ended up being part of Krolikovski’s particular family in the morgue. When the police were looking for a specific body, he would react by going beyond the numbering that identified each one. “Number 173? Yes, she is such a beautiful woman. The 180? Sure, the healthy, sporty-looking man. Even in those cases we had to show respect”, he stresses. And he remembers the days when more victims arrived: “He is very tough physically. Take them, bring them… some had to stay outside because there was no room either in the truck or in the room inside”.
Krolikovski was born 39 years ago in Donbas, the region of eastern Ukraine almost controlled by pro-Russian separatists, where the war accumulates hundreds of deaths every day. He then moved to Crimea, the Ukrainian peninsula illegally occupied by Russia since 2014, where he trained as an artist. That year he arrived in the capital, in the shadow of the revolution that expelled the Kremlin-friendly president, Victor Yanukovych, from power and the country. “I ran away from Russian propaganda and fell in love with that movement in kyiv,” he recalls.
At all times he tries to draw lessons and struggles to cling to the straw of optimism. “I hope that all this helps to understand that death is something real, so that people are less cruel. There is a lot of evil in our lives. I think that the Russians in doing all this must have had hell in their heads, ”she reflects. Now, after three and a half weeks in the morgue, he grants the interview without leaving the group of volunteers. At times it seems that he has emerged unscathed from his immersion in the mortuary. But not. Living in such a close and traumatic way with death, without having previous experience and in a position that almost nobody accepts, it is easy for it to end up taking a toll. And he admits it: “In the war a part of me has died. Today I am a totally different person. It’s not just the morgue, the rapes, the torture… I’m someone else.”
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