Olha Borysenko

COVID-19 has left its mark on everyone! For me, this year is associated with diagnostics and treatment related to the desire to get pregnant, because life does not stop even during a pandemic. In the conditions of this year, the most minimal planned tests, procedures and visits to doctors mean the risk of getting sick with COVID-19, and, moreover, infecting your relatives, which doubles anxiety and worries. My husband’s mother was sick with COVID-19 in a severe form, and we personally experienced all the consequences of the disease and the stages of its treatment in Ukraine.

In places like a hospital, you become an unwitting witness to someone else’s grief. While my mother-in-law was undergoing treatment at the hospital, I heard about a couple of gay men who also had to deal with this terrible disease. For me, it was not only their tragedy as victims of COVID-19 that was shocking, but also the attitude of the hospital staff and other patients towards them. We have a bias and apprehension about COVID-19 in LGBT patients. All these accumulated emotions that I had to endure during this period, I wanted to express to the whole world as much as I can – through photography.

I also stopped trusting strangers, including myself, became a little paranoid and distanced myself from everyone.

During the period of quarantine, I began to work more online or via video communication, projects became more personal and intimate, based on my own experience. I myself and my family became models, the spaces became more closed. And besides, now I have experience in on-line filming.

Path to the flowers of life 2020 While a terrible virus takes the lives of millions of people around the planet, women around the world want to restore balance and give this world new lives. Unfortunately, not always their noble aspirations can be crowned with success. And while society is smoothly going crazy within four walls, these fighters for justice are going crazy in hospital rooms. Here you are always naked and unprotected, both physically and morally, the whole truth about yourself is revealed to you in an undisguised form. I know this firsthand, as I myself went through this hell. This series is about me and the same women who want to have children, but face obstacles on this difficult path. It’s like punishment for a crime we didn’t commit. This is a path through many disgusting green-yellow-blue walls, long hours of nervous anticipation and terrible anxiety, hundreds of painful tests and humiliating procedures, a variety of drugs and difficult exercises.

It is a long and tiring road, but hope supports and helps to move forward, through all obstacles, because children are the main flowers of life. And I am sure that none of us will give up and in the end, we will achieve success by opening new doors for someone, as opposed to those that are closed for many days in and day out.

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