Do svidaniya, mama.
Anastasia Shvachko’s final project deals with her homeland Russia, her family and the war.
Photo: Anastasia Shvachko
Photo by Anastasia Shvachko
Photo: Anastasia Shvachko
Photo: Anastasia Shvachko
With the annexation of Crimea and the invasion of the Donbass in Ukraine in 2014, Russia prepared the way to invade neighboring Ukraine on February 24, 2022. The war between the nations also becomes a shattering conflict between friends, parents and children, moreover, a test of the own identity of Russian citizens. Photographer Anastasia Shvachko left Russia in 2014, in the midst of the origins of today’s war, to get to know the world that always seemed out of reach from faraway Siberia. The distance from their homeland is increasingly becoming a distance from their ideological roots. She is shaken by the pro-Russian attitude of some of her friends and her own family toward the war against Ukraine. The photo book “Do svidaniya, mama” tells the journey of the photographer, started at the age of 23, who ten years later lives in a liberal society with the general skepticism towards Russians*. She searches for certainties that were abruptly destroyed by the war – certainties towards her homeland, towards friends, and not least towards her own mother, for whom she is considered a traitor to the fatherland.
Anastasia Shvachko was born in 1991 in Tomsk, Russia. There she graduated in journalism in 2013 and moved to Hannover in 2014 to study “photojournalism and documentary photography”. In 2018, she interned for six months in the photo editorial department of STERN magazine. Today Anastasia Shavachko lives in Hanover and works as a camerawoman in a film agency.
