Exhibition made from suffering

The exhibition "Service Complexes: Donbass. 365 days of the ATO ”is in the Pavilion“ Ukraine ”at VDNH. Real artifacts from the war were brought there, including the famous stele with the name “Debaltseve” from the city, behind which the most fierce battles of recent months were going on in winter.

Passing into the first hall through a black curtain, the audience stops for a second. Suspiciously, with a squint, a cardboard militia with a machine gun in his hand measures them with a squint. The boy in a earflaps, designed for an adult, looks curiously. The church with traces of bullets, a village house, half of which turned into chips, against the background of the house - an old woman with a desperate face. Everything is flat, cardboard, but does not leave a terrible sense of reality: maybe because the female voice, nervous and complaining of the speakers. It is impossible to disassemble the words - the sounds of shell gaps interfere. But you can hear the story passes into sobs.

In the next halls - actually "material evidence". Exhibits are not just realistic - these are real objects from the real war. On the ground poured on the floor, the sleeves from shells are laid out, road signs sprouted by bullets are lying - everything is brought from the DPR and LPR. The minibus, which was blown up on the mine, was also real: for transportation, it had to be cut in two, and then, in place, to assemble. The minibus transported 13 refugees, and they all died, says an exhibition employee who monitors order in the hall. Nearby - a photo of the minibus in the place of the explosion. Actually, this is a photo exhibition, but physical exhibits act on the viewer much more. Nearby was reconstructed a living room, stained with an explosion: the beams from the ceiling fell on the table and a chair. And you believe in this door to a dishwasher planted with an explosive wave, in a doll, covered with dust from a demolished roof.

There is an operational room here, where children are not allowed. The children immediately become unbearably curious that inside, they pull their necks and are eager to look at the opening door.

- And the torn hands there are also real?

“There are corpses,” an elderly woman guesses with a mixture of horror and disgust.

“Oh, I’ll go,” her granddaughter immediately declares with a punctured eyebrow and boldly walks at the door. True, inside the girl lasted fifteen seconds. On the operating table - a mannequin with guts out. On a bed by the wall - a girl with a bloody stump instead of a hand, on the floor - smeared blood, as if wiped, but threw it. On the table are a torn arm and a foot.

This realism of the exhibition suppresses and confuses that a girl is twelve years old as she is asking a “operating” father from the “operating”:

- And the torn hands there are also real?

Therefore, when you see next to the metal letters “Debaltsevo” (the sign that became a symbol of the city during the battles, after taking it by separatists, was cut and brought to Moscow) the guy in camouflage and with the emblem of Novorossia on the sleeve, you are not even surprised. It seems to the call sign - "Bear." Near Mom: She brought him to the exhibition.

“With the condition that I will not cry,” adds.

“Yes, the mother of two shelling was enough: as Mina flew past the balcony, so she left,” the “bear” smiles. The guy is tall, but looks like a tenth grader: you won’t give him more than 18. “He graduated from the music school,” mother proudly inserts, “and writes songs.” In the native Severodonetsk of the Luhansk region, grandfather and grandmother remained: they do not want to leave the house in any way. The Bear itself (his name is Mark) in Moscow on vacation, soon backward, in the LPR. Mark willingly talks about the gray -year -old girl, whom he saw, about how the fragment once fell right in front of his face. He barely restrains a smile when the girl passing by photographs him on the iPhone.

- From Ukraine, or what? -the old man-sibling is sympathetically interested in Mark.

- From New Russia! - proudly corrects him.

- Well done! - the woman rejoices. -Tell me, what is the end of this all?

- Victory!

No gray -haired girls and bombed houses keep the brand from participating in the war. “Yes, if I stay without legs, I still won’t stop! Do you know how many killed, shot, raped? "

A boy of about four is eager to touch a minibus, a minibus, an explosion. “They shot in the car! They shot straight! " - repeats with enthusiasm.

- This exhibition does not show anything! This is so, pictures, - the "bear" is angrily dismissed when I ask about his opinion. However, he approves and perceives it unequivocally: as sympathetic in relation to the "people's republics." But not all visitors read the same Message. There are no signatures to the exhibits. Whose shell destroyed the house in the photo, in whose mine a minibus exploded - the audience is offered to guess. There is only infographics about the number of killed, wounded, refugees: part of the data, by the way, was taken from the Ukrainian portal Inforesist . Org . On the floor lies the unexploded Ukrainian "Point U" missile, but not all visitors have enough knowledge to understand what kind of bent barrel this is. Of the obvious “hints”, the viewer is unless the Ukrainian flag and a coat of arms are lying on the ground near the wheels of the trophy Ukrainian jeep, and the flags of the DPR and LPR are proudly hanging on barricades from bags with sand and tires. There are mannequins of separatists at the exhibition. Ukrainian troops - no. The exhibition was made with close cooperation of the governments of the DPR and the LPR. And its very name is “Donbass. 365 days of ATO ” - sets up in the corresponding mood. The deputy curator of this exposition is Miodg Mladic, a Serbian nationalist, a member of the Serbian Radical Party, advocating the creation of the Great Serbia and the country's friendship with Russia and China, and not with the EU. This is part of the international project Material Evidence : Similar exhibitions (but with many times less material exhibits) about Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria in Brussels, New York and Berlin.

The emphasis is on children - it is striking. A school class with an explosive wave inverted by an explosive wave was reconstructed. The exhibit - a doll without clothing - sits surrounded by photographs from the destroyed kindergarten. And Moscow children who came to walk at VDNH on the weekend look at all this. Many families say they came here by chance. The exhibition is free.

Teenagers shoot all in a row on phones, the kids are spinning, some generally watch an exhibition of strollers. Unlike adults, they do not quite understand what all this means. A boy of about four is eager to touch a minibus, a minibus, an explosion. “They shot in the car! They shot straight! " - repeats with enthusiasm.

“Mom, take me a picture of me,” another preschooler suggests, apparently accustomed to the fact that he is removed against the background of everything interesting.

“I won’t,” the mother says, biting her lips.

- Why? - the child is perplexed.

“A hat,” says a blond girl about an exhibit - a broken helmet. “Look, there was a house, people lived. Babakh - and not at home, ”her grandfather explains to her and sister, pointing to a photograph of the ruins.

- And what's the terrible? This is life, let them know! - He says when I am interested in why he brought children here. - An excellent exhibition, people need to show what Ukrainian fascists are!

And this was the only person (except the militia Mark) from a dozen respondents who unequivocally found guilty.

- Correct exhibition. Let people see that war is horror, nobody needs it, we must stop it, - as the organizers of the organizers, the programmer Mikhail, understood the message.

“But it generally annoys me that they made an exhibition out of the suffering,” his wife is at a hacking.

-On TV, they show one thing, but here you somehow better feel what is happening there. I would like to get into the place of these people, to feel how they are hiding from the explosions anywhere, ”says another visitor, Victor. For him, this is a way of sympathy, a way of participating in someone else's trouble. -After that, you watch the news differently.

Sedei Vyacheslav takes off her teenage daughter against the backdrop of children's drawings in blue-yellow tones with inscriptions in the Ukrainian “We are for peace!” And "Glory to Ukraine!"

- I was in Karabakh, I know that war is very bad. He came to the child to show, ”he says. - My friends, colleagues, now in Ukraine ...

- Are they fighting?

- Not really! Live. In Kharkov, in Chernivtsi ...

-So, probably, one of them for Ukrainians, and someone supports the separatists?

- We were one country. We will not kill each other, ”Vyacheslav replies harshly. - Of course, you can’t forgive everything ... But it is necessary to solve this in the other way! The war is always beneficial to someone. And not to us.