Andriy Rachinskiy

The project consists of a book and documentary film about city signboards, which have suffered the ravages of war during the full-scale Russian invasion. For the last 10 years I have been engaged in studying and collecting old signboards in Kharkiv city; documenting and collecting have always been of great importance to me, and thus I have collected a very large photo archive of signboards. I have always been interested in the themes of lettering and urban space. The film will tell about Kharkiv, recording the consequences of Russian aggression in my native city. Despite daily shelling, I will document the damaged and destroyed city signboards.
I plan to release a book with this material, along with a video that would show the stages of work on the archive, and how I found and collected this material. After February 24, I couldn’t think at all about the work, let alone the book. Later, over time I decided to continue working on this project and to implement it. It is very frightening to look at everything that is happening now. It is a painful time for Kharkiv and its inhabitants.
The central part of this project is a trip to Kharkiv to document the consequences of Russia’s aggression, chronicling the destroyed places that I love so much, and recording the transformation and degradation of signboards after the Russian shellings. I consider it necessary to record and preserve this story.