"My name is Valeria Duca, I am a painter and in March of 2022 I went back to Moldova to volunteer and document, in the way that I could, the refugee crisis.
I thought it was important to paint about this, so I made a series of works of refugees sleeping. The Ukrainians that I met on the ground, often didn’t have anything with them other than a bag of random things taken in a rush and a couple of euros.
People need so little for safety. A shelter, food and quiet.
The beds were often just a mattress on the floor, put there in a rush, in student accommodations, old hospital wings or even sports arenas. I will always remember the stacks of clothes, the mountains of pillows and duvets, and the bedding sheets. Every time there was mismatch in the patterns of the sheets, I would think - that’s another person who has donated, these things are brought here by so many different people.
I still find it complicated to gather my thoughts about the time I spent in Moldova in March of this year. I think it’s just surreal that we live in a day and age when bloody wars intertwine with dance routines on TikTok. I honestly thought that the biggest problem my generation would face would be climate change, trying to be sustainable seems a large enough problem on its own. I thought the biggest venture of my generation would be space, flying to Mars, opening new horizons. I thought, naively that we’re outside history, part of an epilogue… It seemed to me that everything that could have happened has already happened. The best music had been written. The best paintings had been painted. The most brutal wars had been fought. So, when on the 24th of February, Russia invaded Ukraine, this whole understanding of life went away.
What helped me, along these months, rather than shut down from reality and pretend it isn’t happening, was to concentrate on the kindness that people show. Moldova, for example, a small country of only 3 million people, hosted over 100,000 refugees at its peak, the most percentage of refugees per capita. There is force in kindness, and that should be celebrated.
And there was so much kindness that I witnessed in Moldova: The hundreds of drivers that signed up to be contacted at ANY time of day or night, to drive for free; Ruslan, the Ukrainian refugee who became an active volunteer, carrying newcomers’ bags at the Manej Sportshall in Chisinau; The man who transformed his newly opened Squash Club in a shelter; The girl who travelled from Israel to take care of Ukrainian children’s playtime while parents were concerned with logistics; The man who came back to Moldova after spending twenty years in New York, to help his religious community; the hotel near the Ukraine boarder, that ran out of money by the second week, because they were giving all the food away for free; The NGO activist, that was delivering trash bins and children’s toys to refugee centres, while consulting on the need to manage the donations in a sustainable way. The girl that re-oriented her home patisserie start-up business to deliver goods to the refugees at her own expense. The taxis that refused fares. The art exhibitions in support of the Ukrainian artists. The love, the giving, the understanding, the community that came together. Empathy is stronger than fear. And while most Moldovans I know lived with their bags packed the whole of spring, ready to leave the country in of fear of Russian expansion; they spent their days helping. Many volunteered to the brink of exhaustion. They didn’t sleep, so that others could rest.
Why? Because people want to live in peace. I tried to capture in this series of works the most peaceful moments I found in the middle of a crisis – people sleeping. One realises how much power there is kindness, when a whole society comes together to make moments like these possible."
- Valeria Duca, Spring 2022
