On Jet Line and Warexpo screens: photographs 'Kindergarten. Bucha, February 2022'

Since February 24, we have been broadcasting fourteen spots with Olga Maistrenko's photographs on our MORE network screens and on the Warexpo Smart Citylight network screens in Warsaw. Olga took photos in the basement of a kindergarten in Bucha in February 2022. For nearly 2 weeks, it served as a shelter for her family and other residents of the city.

Bucha, Hero City of Ukraine

Olga: When does a photographer, a family event photographer like I was in Bucha, take pictures?
When there's a christening, a wedding, a party, a birthday, when it's joyful and there's an occasion.
War is not that occasion.

Bucha is a city in the Kyiv Oblast, one with the honorary title of Hero City. In February and March, Russian soldiers committed crimes against the civilian population there, among other places. Olga Maistrenko, a photographer, Ukrainian, and resident of Bucha, spent nearly 2 weeks after the escalation of Russian aggression with her family in the basement of the kindergarten her daughter attended. The basement was designed to shelter 100 people, but at its peak, 350 people lived there. Roughly half were children of various ages, from infants to teenagers.

Important topics in out-of-home advertising

Olga: When we took shelter in the basement of my daughter's kindergarten, I brought my camera with me. Not to take pictures there, but so it wouldn't be destroyed. But people said: since you have a camera, take pictures, you must take them. This is our history. Do it. So that no one can say later that it didn't happen, that it wasn't real.

The photos capture moments from late February and early March 2022. The days look almost normal. Children play cards, people sit on beds, on chairs, someone prepares a meal in a large pot, someone has medicine ready, boys sweep the floor, a dog demands attention. The basement was recently painted with colorful images, in case it had to receive children and their families again.

DOOH: information, report, documentation.

Olga: After a few days, I couldn't pick up my camera anymore. I didn't touch it for almost three months, even when we were safe in Warsaw. I just wasn't able to; my hands were shaking, something was squeezing inside me. Suddenly, I couldn't take pictures. Taking pictures didn't associate with people's joy for me. Such moments and such images as those from the kindergarten were not only recorded in the camera. They were also recorded within me.

Olga and her daughter, now 7 years old, left Bucha on March 8, and have been living in Warsaw since March 10.
Olga works at Jet Line; she is a photographer.

Photographs 'Kindergarten. Bucha, February 2022' by Olga Maistrenko for one week on Jet Line digital screens in 7 major Polish cities and on the Smart Citylight Warexpo network in Warsaw.

Bucha, Ukraine