Spovid’ (Ukrainian for “confession”) advances Ira Lupu’s inquiry into the human condition amid war, with a particular focus on the latent collective trauma embedded in routine life. The project seeks to construct an “archive of affects”—a visual and emotional repository of sensations, responses, and psychic residue that linger at the periphery of conscious awareness and bodily experience in both everyday and frontline life.
While acknowledging the primacy of destruction as the dominant visual register of war, the artist contemplates whether deeper truths might lie within the unarticulated emotional terrain of those enduring it. The project’s subjects include a diverse array of individuals—Ukrainian soldiers (including former prisoners released on parole who volunteered to join the army), civilian youth, grieving partners, immigrants, and even animals who, at times of conflict, are subject to ecocide. Each image is part of a larger story that embodies affective dualities: alienation and warmth, disintegration and resilience, survival and transcendence.
Named after the spiritual ritual of confession, Spovid’ presents empathetic visual fragments that evoke vulnerability, catharsis, and the search for meaning amid collapse. Many images carry a dreamlike quality, inviting a slower gaze and reflecting the altered states of perception that emerge when individuals adapt, self-reflect, or unravel under the burden of survival. The project reflects on what it means to witness, to remember, and to carry trauma that is not easily visible—what critic Kateryna Iakovlenko calls “the knowledge we carry within us now.”
The photographic process itself becomes part of the conceptual framework: analog black-and-white medium format and disposable camera imagery is combined with redscale film, wherein the negative is exposed through its red base rather than the emulsion side. This reinforces the project’s central concern with the inversion of internal states into visible form.