Witchcraft has always been a huge part of Ukrainian culture and everyday life. One of the first works of fiction prose written in Ukrainian was a text about a witch from Konotop (a city in Sumy Oblast), written in 1833 by Hryhorii Kvitka-Osnovianenko.

After the full-scale invasion started there, also in Konotop, but already in 2022, in one of the videos from the first days of the war, an unarmed civilian woman shouts to the Russian occupants on tanks: "Do you in fact know where you are? This is Konotop! Here every second woman is a witch!"

For me, witchcraft is a way of gaining power, confidence, control and authority. But it is also a field of fear and anxiety, excitement and worry. My fears and anxieties about magic, as well as memories of magical rituals and situations that have surrounded me throughout my life, have led me to this series. The fact that magic and witchcraft in Ukraine is not a rediscovered phenomenon, but rather a long linear process that has never ended has always fascinated me.

I'm not trying to fight my fear radically. I like the sneak peek and coquetry aspect. But also, for me, this project is about re-evaluating and reconstructing what has been lost. My work with this project by far included working with ethnographical texts and documents, stories from my family, reconstructions and reenactments of witch trials, working with different materials such as clay, wax, glass, dough and herbs.

On the one hand, it's a documentary set that captures six months of life in two psychiatric clinics on a cheap cell phone. The beginnings of my stay are shrouded in fog – only fragments of blurry images in my head. Through the photographs, I try to understand my STATUS and re-member encounters with people with whom I share a similar fate. I remember forming friendships in isolation, a strange and magical togetherness. The image of a heart that glowed in the distance outside the morgue. And the return to reality.

On the other hand, these are stylized self-portraits that serve as a valve in my struggle with my STATES. They offer a glimpse into my crazy world full of color, expressiveness, experience and emptiness, joy and sadness. I feel that I can at least for a while encapsulate the manifestations of my illness in photographs and gain a momentary peace. But then I have to start again. And again. And that's why I take pictures – in fact, that's why I take pictures.

My way of seeing, as a photographer, is closely connected to and was constructed in the female environment, which I’d always look through, but not look at. This series is an attempt to do that. The history of my family has had a profound effect on my photographic practice. Revisiting my artistic choices and themes always brings me back to my roots, to my matriarchal family. Ever since my parents divorced, my coming-into-age world had been populated solely by women. My inner lens got focused on my mom, sisters, and grandmothers. Documenting the flux of daily routines, touching and mundane moments has turned into an artistic study that unfolds and reveals the very nature of womanhood that shaped me as a woman.

Blue Tarp – a hyperobject that cannot be escaped. One of the symbols of the current state of the world. It appears in both urban and natural landscapes, surprising me with each new incarnation. It conceals the treasures of gardeners, unfinished works of builders, or slowly decomposes among the leaves in the forest.

It is true that at least once in your lifetime you have heard about ball lightning. But can you be sure that it exists? No, because it has never been proven. Official sources say that contacts with ball lightning have been recorded since the Middle Ages and even earlier. But they immediately deny their existence, referring to paid scientists, stupid physicists and even doctors. "They" are trying to tell us that ball lightnings, or more correctly, controlled energy balls, are hallucinations, delusions of vision, and nonsense... But this is manipulation, outright lies. In reality, the available facts and evidence confirm that the existence of controlled energy balls is not a joke. Thousands of eyewitnesses and victims speak for themselves. But the truth is that the history of controlled energy balls begins in 1951. In the same year, the body of a journalist who died under mysterious circumstances was found in the city of Helbshire. Why would you pay attention to the mysterious death of an ordinary person?

It was later revealed that it was this journalist, John Foster, who prepared the material about the secret laboratory in Helbshire a few weeks earlier. His article says that this mysterious place is developing special weapons in the form of controlled energy balls. He writes that these balls will be able to control the birth rate and adversely affect young children. This information is alarming. But even more frightening is the fact that after 1951 none of the open sources of any country in the world provided any information, references or data about the city of Helbshire. Perhaps something is really being hidden from us? The nephew of the murdered journalist, Greg Foster, decided to get to the truth. He holds secret documents, materials, eyewitness accounts and real facts at his disposal. All the documents available to us at the moment are written in a secret cipher that is unlike any existing language. For many years, Greg has been deciphering these materials. Numerous eyewitnesses who met objects similar to these balls complain of fever, headache and sudden bruises on their stomachs. Usually a few days after the tragedy, the victims are informed of infertility. How long will "they" continue to hide the truth from us? Wake up.

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Conspiracies are an attempt to understand, to explain the complex and incomprehensible. In my project I'm trying to combine different aspects of conspiracy theories to find ideas that manipulate basic human fears. Absolutely everything in my project is fictional. In this way I explore my personal attitude towards conspiracy theories and even my childhood. Belief in ball lightning is very common among Ukrainians. When it rains, I always close the windows, fearing that ball lightning will fly into my house. Also, my project is a commentary on the future that awaits us. In times of uncertainty, conspiracy theories will go on and on.

Have you ever tried putting into words the feeling of coming home after being away for a while?

It carries a certain weight of melancholy - you see your parents getting older, buildings getting demolished and rivers running dry. Everything looks familiar, yet different. Yet it is so warm and comforting. It tastes like grandma’s cooking and smells like bonfire. It is fleeting, but somehow ever present. It’s like you’re covered with a big, soft duvet and no troubles or worries can get to you. You feel so light you’re almost floating and the whole world seems so far away. You dive into the sea of fuzzy memories where time is reversed and childhood emerges from the past to become your present again.

I take a graphic approach to photography, working with the method of scanning. It is fascinating to me because of the possibility of looking at objects outside the usual time and space, which allows me using of a computer vision techniques. This results in images unencumbered by our perspective and time constraints. The work should convey the wonder of something that is not directly visible and cannot be directly photographed. I am also interested in the fact that computer processed texture is an illusion of objective observation. In places of uncertainty, the machine fabulates and the backdrop is revealed by various glitches and imperfections. The output of my work are moving images (mostly looped 360° panoramas of tree trunks) and long-format prints. Vimeo link: https://vimeo.com/lukasopekar