Where Is My Steppe?
Dariia Dantseva
Photo Collage, Video
2023-2024
Where Is My Steppe? explores the loss and transformation of Ukrainian steppes through a personal lens, drawing on Daria’s family history and the impact of the ongoing war. The steppe, traditionally a symbol of freedom and an integral part of Ukrainian identity, becomes the focal point of her investigation.
Where Is My Steppe? is both an ecological and cultural exploration, urging the restoration and protection of the steppes on multiple levels – from the personal to the collective. It is a call to understand these natural landscapes more deeply as part of Ukrainian identity, which must be preserved and reinterpreted in the face of contemporary challenges.
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My grandmother, Hanna Dantseva.
Myshuryn Rih village, Dnipropetrovsk region, 2001.
The last patch of steppe in this area. She looks happy.
I wonder what this place looks like now?
I wish I could be there with her.
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All of these photos are taken from my family archive. This is not a clever storytelling move. I don’t have a steppe to photograph, but I will try to find it. This is not a coincidence, but a pattern.
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Artemisia absinthium
Why do I feel such bitterness if I never saw the wormwood bloom?
Where is my steppe? Where has it gone? Where is the vastness my ancestors spoke of? Where is the part of my identity? Where is my wild field?
In Dnipropetrovsk region, the steppe remains only as a collective hallucination of the locals. How can it be restored?
Can it be decolonised, decommunised, like a cultural phenomenon?
Or has an irreversible process already taken place?
I only know exhausted fields. I know what hectares of sunflower, alfalfa, winter wheat, melons, and sugar beets look like.
But have you ever seen hectares of feather grass, wormwood, and fescue?
At the beginning of the 19th century—they found coal in the steppe and began to dig.
In the 1920s, they started ploughing the virgin land.
1927—they began flooding the Dnipro and drowning the steppe.
In 1954, they built the Middle Dnipro Hydroelectric Station and submerged my grandmother's favourite field.
They ploughed up the steppe and introduced invasive species.
Is this not genocide? Is this not the erasure of national identity?
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Invasion
The silverberry releases substances into the soil;
They prevent our own from growing;
And give space for the foreign to thrive.
When my father was 12, all the young pioneers were forced to gather acacia seeds and bring them to school for further planting.
“The quota was 2 cups. You collect the pods, then at home, you shell them and take out the seeds. They’re small, so it takes a long time to gather.”
“We didn’t actually plant them. We brought them to school, and then the seeds were given away somewhere. Probably to some forestry.”
How many times have they forced my family to destroy the steppe with their own hands?
To conquer lands not only with an army of people who don’t belong to these lands but with plants that don’t belong here either.
Resistance to plant invasion.
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Eco-Antivandalism
What can we do?
Is this the right moment?
Is there space for individual impact?
Is it worth fighting for what has disappeared?
Can my grandmother ever see the steppe again, as she remembers it?
What if we try to stop this plant chauvinism?
Grounded
I design solutions, yet I feel powerless to act on them.
From science to the individual.
From problem to proposal.
From r**ia to Ukraine.
The old is our new.
Eradicate: Silverberry, False acacia, Goldenrod, Milkweed, Boxelder maple, Ragweed.
Root: Clover, Fescue, Ryegrass, Wheatgrass, Sweet Clover, Feather grass
Where is My Steppe?!
We will go with my grandmother to the ravine. We will collect seeds there. We’ll pop a party cracker there. I will take a piece of this ravine with me and plant it under my windows. I will try to do something to bring the steppe back to my grandma. I want to see the steppe. I have lived here for 23 years, and I have never seen it.