Ewa Krutova arrived to the Netherlands from Ukraine in March 2022. As millions of other Ukrainians, the artist experienced strong stress of changing the environment and living in uncertainty with strangers. Her work is full of complex stories about loneliness and equity, rights, and cultural cliches. There is a subtle mix of intonations: from humour to sorrow, and the hope of finding a place to call home.
In her video work “When a Tomato Becomes a Piece of Cake” (produced between November 2022 and May 2023, Yaroslava addresses the rapid changes in one’s behavior when we are forced to adapt to new circumstances, focusing on the physical as well as mental changes that one must undergo in order to adapt to the different levels of what is understood as polite communication in another cultural context. This feeling is especially strong when it comes to the sadness and anxiety of dealing in the distance with the events occurring in your home country, but you are unable to share it in public all the time. Instead, you learn to build a different behavior on top of what you actually feel - and talk about the future instead of talking about the war. At this very moment integration and the idea of fitting into a different society becomes more important for survival. By showing these struggling aspects of the integration process in these circumstances, Yaroslava aims to visualise her own changes, examining to what extent she can fit into this new social context in such a different setting: a tomato that tries to become a piece of cake.
The piece undergoes Ewa’s own story of trying to find answers on how to find a new home without fully fitting into this new hosting society. Although the story relates to the story of Ukrainian people, along her journey, Yaroslava was impressed by how many people with different experiences can have shared feelings on this quest for finding what is known as home.
The work consists of two parts: the first is documenting the artist’s everyday life, and the second represents the artist’s internal world that exists in parallel with daily routine. Kruttova performs as the main character, showing her story of being hosted by a Dutch family. She picks up on physical changes, such as not eating sugar because her hosts would not eat it, cooking different food, making a different type of coffee, and wearing completely different clothes - in short, completely transforming her habits and self-representation, unavoidably entering an internal conflict and mental destabilisation. Besides transforming her own experience into the script, Kruttova also bases it on stories of other Ukrainian women she interviewed for her former work - a three channel video installation called “I don’t think I’ll stay here for long” (2022).
Sound is a key element in the piece, aiming to portray the rapid changing of feelings. It also includes motives from Ukrainian traditional songs referring to the baggage the artist brings to her new context. Screams aim to give a feeling of disruption and the speed of the montage refers to the changing speed in which she was moved from one country to another, the changing speed of days and movements since she left her place in Ukraine, and the contrast between moments of rest and adaptation and the pressure of being active, productive and engaged within this new social context.
The project addresses the questions: Is “home” a place or an emotional state? Or maybe it is a feeling of when you are with someone with whom you feel safe? Can you find new home within a new society without being rooted in it? Perhaps, can you loose yourself, your former achievements and story, in this process of assimilation… And what is a price to pay to find one’s new identity?
Text by Nuria Bofarull.
Credits
Direction, script, acting: Yaroslava Ewa Krutova
Videography: Anastasija Kiake
Sound design: Yevhenii Simakov
Postproduction: Masha Gurova
Duration: 31:22 minutes
Special thanks to Daria Tuminas, Femke Rotteveel, Jana Romanova, Roy Bijhouwer, Anne-Mie Devolder, Lotte de Jager and Florian Koch.