Amniotic Black Sea

The project was presented at the Third Ukrainian Biennale of Digital and Media Art at the Museum of Kyiv.

In this work, I combine NASA satellite images of the Black Sea and Crimea — territories marked by occupation and deep trauma — with medical imagery of amniotic fluid, where new life begins.
This overlay of two scales — the planetary and the intimate — creates a parallel between the body of the Earth and the human body.

The sea appears here as an amniotic fluid: a space where new life emerges, yet one that can be poisoned or disturbed by war. Crimea becomes a part of the maternal body — violated, yet still carrying the potential of renewal.

The concept arose from the act of observing the Crimean Peninsula through aerial and digital imagery after its occupation and annexation by Russia.
This distant gaze — both detached and painfully intimate — evokes the feeling of being inside an amniotic sea: unable to intervene, yet deeply connected to what unfolds.
The Black Sea becomes a threshold of vision and memory, where geopolitical violence intertwines with the ancient image of life suspended in liquid.

The work poses questions:

• How are we born into a world already marked by trauma?
• Is recovery possible when the very “fluid of life” is contaminated by conflict?
• Can the Earth — like the body — heal itself?

Visual Component

The diptych consists of two media images:
1. The first image is an X-ray of my father’s inflamed lungs merged with a NASA image of Crimea taken in July. The image remains unretouched — deliberately raw and documentary.
2. The second image is a collage of NASA satellite photos of Crimea from July and early August, composed to resemble an ultrasound scan, with minimal AI intervention.

This visual pairing emphasizes the formal resemblance between lung tissue and the sea’s surface, suggesting that both the human body and the sea are living systems — capable of illness, aging, and trauma.
X-ray and ultrasound become universal languages of diagnosis, and the refusal to aestheticize turns the work into a direct document of two organisms’ shared condition.

Video

In the video, the Black Sea is identified with the amniotic fluid — the first landscape encountered by a human being, a protective medium that allows growth in suspension.
The work presents the Black Sea as a vast collective womb — one that conceals, isolates, and remembers. It speaks of gestation not only on a biological level, but also on cultural and historical ones, where layers of memory and trauma accumulate like geological strata beneath the waves.

Here, the Amniotic Black Sea becomes a metaphorical return to origins, where the sea appears both as a womb and an abyss.
Its stratified waters — rarely mixing — embody the duality of life and suffocation: on the surface, currents of movement and exchange; in the depths, silence, toxicity, and suspended time.
This paradox transforms the sea into an amniotic reservoir — a place where creation and decay coexist.