ZIAMLIAČKA

By the fourth year of forced exile, displacement had become a state of exhaustion — a loss of strength, orientation, and inner ground. I came to understand that the energy to keep living comes not only from people, but also from the soil beneath our feet. The ache of losing one’s soil, and the way it holds us, is difficult to grasp until it is gone.

My mother dug up 225 kilograms of soil from the plot where our ancestral home once stood. Today, there is only a void. This soil crossed borders by necessity and with great difficulty, becoming both material and witness.

Through enfleurage, I enter into an intimate ritual with what has been lost: fat and ethanol absorb the scent of the soil, preserving the aroma of a place that cannot be fully carried away. This extract becomes a form of memory — an attempt to recover a fragment of lost peace.

Held inside a hand-blown glass seed, suspended in the moment of falling back into the soil, the extract becomes a fragile vessel for what remains of home: the scent of Belarusian earth, the trace of belonging, and the longing for ground that can no longer hold us.

By the end of 2024, according to UNHCR, 123.2 million people worldwide had been forcibly displaced. ZIAMLIAČKA begins with one personal loss, but extends toward this wider condition: the rupture between body and ground, the disappearance of home as a physical place, and the longing for soil that can no longer hold the body.

Source: UNHCR, Global Trends Report 2024.