Annealing
Yana Zalevska, call sign Multik, is a Ukrainian unit commander who was severely injured in a Russian shelling. Almost no images exist of the time that begins after an injury like that, because everything that can be shown ends with the operating theatre, and what follows happens without witnesses, leaving a woman alone with a body that no longer matches the one she remembers as her own.
The first thing that happens to her is that she loses herself. Fear, pain and panic thicken around a person until they have crowded out everything that came before, walling her into a darkness that holds no space, no time and nothing she recognises, and that gives every appearance of being permanent.
The walls that stand longest afterwards are the ones she builds herself. They grow out of whatever she has come to believe she now is, and they remain standing long after everything visible has healed. Women are handed this particular wall more often, and they usually take it apart in silence and alone, without even a language in which the thing could be described.
There is no steady progress out of it, because every day that comes easier is followed by another on which everything returns to where it started. And what keeps a person alive never arrives at the end as a reward for having survived correctly; it is already there on the first day, unreliable and unearned, long before anything at all has been settled, and everything that follows is built on top of it.
In metalwork, what Yana, and many other women that got injures, scares, lost parts of their bodies and parts of themselves in Ukraine , what they are going through is called annealing. A material that has already been in the fire is heated a second time and then left to cool slowly, over hours, so that the tension locked inside it has time to work its way out. What comes out of the furnace is not harder than it was, but able to carry weight without breaking.
Yana agreed to go through this with me in front of the camera, and she knew from the start who it was addressed to: women who are only entering this road, or standing somewhere in the middle of it now, still scary to face what happened to them and what they need to accept.
"In these photographs I do not see aggression, and I do not see pain as the main character. I see character. I see a path. I see a woman who went through a great pain, lost, fears, frustration and did not lose herself, a woman slowly becoming beautiful piece of marble, not because the pain is beautiful but because she found the strength to live through it and accept it."
This work is for anyone afraid that what happened has broken them for good, because a person does not come out of the fire harder, but finally able to carry her own weight.
