“Ти тут” — you are here, in English — is the point from which to begin again. Not a geographical indication, but a genuine act of awareness. The project by photographer Iryna Kostyuk, which will be presented at the Liquida Photofestival, moves through this suspended space between past and present, where memory is never linear but fragmented, intermittent, and above all difficult to grasp.

At the heart of the work is a process of reconnection: the artist returns to a distant traumatic experience, filtering it through a child’s perspective. This is not a simple narrative device, but a precise choice. Childhood here is not nostalgia, but a perceptual condition: a phase in which reality is endured before it is even understood, in which language is missing and all that remains is an opaque, unresolved sensation. It is precisely in this gray area that Kostyuk builds her images.

The photographs avoid any form of explicit representation. There is no spectacularization of pain, nor any desire to make it directly visible. On the contrary, everything plays out through absence, through what is left unsaid, through a tension that is felt more than seen. It is a deliberate subtraction, one that rejects the fetishization of trauma and restores dignity to the subject.

In this sense, photography becomes a necessary tool, almost therapeutic. It does not document, but processes. It does not recount an event, but works on its emotional trace. Each image is part of a cathartic process, an attempt to give shape to something that, by its very nature, resists form.

The title itself functions as an anchor: “you are here.” A simple, almost banal statement, yet one loaded with meaning. It is an invitation to return to the present, to recognize that trauma has been endured, but does not define identity. It is not a boundary, but a passage.

Iryna Kostyuk’s project therefore moves along a fragile yet powerful balance: that between memory and liberation. Without ever indulging in storytelling, it succeeds in creating a space in which pain can be acknowledged without being displayed, and in which, finally, it can turn into awareness.