The photographic excitement – ​​exhibition in front of the Town Hall

As part of the Emoi Photograhique festival, Christian Barbé's exhibition is presented on the square in front of the Town Hall.

Christian Barbé - “UKRAINE: culture under mothball”, facing the
risks of destruction the main monuments are covered to protect them.
https://www.christianbarbe.com/

Like a coat in which we wrap ourselves up... The feeling of a whole which goes beyond us and contains us, Surrounds us and protects us,
Brings us together.
This national feeling,
" we are ",
Taras Chevchenko – Kobzar (The Bard), is one of the first to talk about it.

Against the injustice of enslavement, the brutalization of bestiality, the poverty of ignorance, Shevchenko sought the distant memory of a people. From the Cimmerians of legends to the Kingdom of kyiv, whose culture and peaceful prosperity radiated for long centuries, to Rome, Constantinople... Before disappearing under the indigent violence and crude tyrannies.

Denouncing the yoke under which he was born and grew up like so many of his loved ones, The Bard awakened memories and revived hope.

What comfort to find this “we” for those who suffer silently, who now know in their soul that they are not alone and that one day Humanity will triumph, because it is written!

In these times when this newly discovered identity is once again threatened, it is now the representations of these men and women, whose pen gave this protective coat, who in turn needed to be protected: their statues.

As evidenced in Borodianka, a martyr town attacked in the first hours of the invasion and which had no time to prepare, the statue of Taras Checchenko, disfigured by the shots of drunken soldiers...

Everywhere, in the streets and squares of Ukrainian cities, we find these statues wrapped in protective cocoons whose care taken in their making is at the height of the recognition and the fierce desire to preserve the heritage of those who erected them.

First a stack of meticulously arranged sandbags, then long wooden beams for reinforcement, firmly belted. Finally, a canvas, sometimes sheet metal or plywood, completes these works on the work.
I can't help but imagine that the worker who sealed this temporary sarcophagus did so with a goodbye note: "We will meet again soon, and the world into whose sun you will re-appear will be closer of the one you imagined for us. »

They say that a people who have no memory have no future.
Seeing the power of the cocoons that protect their memory, the people of Ukraine certainly have a great future.