The exhibition “OWN/ALIEN people, memories, items of 9 PANKIVSKA St.”, like most projects of today’s cultural front, was born of war. On its very first day, the irresistible desire was to “close the sky” over our Home — the Mykhailo Hrushevsky Museum. In the following days we pulled ourselves together, dismantled, relocated, secured, as if sorting through the last 30 years of life in our hands. After all, just before that, on February 3, the museum had marked its 30th anniversary.

Later we wandered painfully through the empty halls, overwhelmed by a sense of déjà vu: we had already seen this, it had already happened. The same empty rooms, the cold echo. This was in the mid-1990s, when “alien people,” who according to Mariia Hrushevska began to appear here in 1938 after the arrests of relatives, were resettled from the house. Then we thought with some anxiety: “What next? How to fill this space?”

“What next? What will our exhibition, nurtured by our ideas, filled with returned memorial objects and revived traditions, look like after Victory?” — we have been thinking for the past seven months…

And so, in these moments and days of “rewinding” the past and reflecting on the future, the idea was born to mark the museum’s 30th anniversary after all. To rewind in memory 30, 15, or 5 years, to recall and tell our guests how we studied the fates of Hrushevsky’s belongings and returned them to their places, who helped, who preserved memories and recollections. And how often “alien” became “own,” cherishing even broken shards of coffee cups, door handles, entrance bells, and other seemingly small items.

Ultimately, the exhibition took shape from separate “stories” that combined human destinies, memories, and surviving memorabilia into concise complexes. One of these “stories” is a collective image entitled “We.” For we, absolutely alien by blood, became “own” for this Home, which welcomed us, opening its doors to creativity. The story “We” is presented through voices of the House’s residents recorded over 30 years, filmed videos, and our recollections.

“OWN/ALIEN” is not only about people. It is also about items — museum objects. For our credo — “not to use alien items, because our own will not return” — was, is, and will remain defining in the concept of the memorial exhibition.

Equally enduring will be the symbol of emotion: a bouquet of mallows, given by Kateryna Hrushevska to her mother Mariia shortly before her arrest in July 1938; a bouquet, “dry of course already,” which stood for all 10 years that Mariia Sylvestrivna waited for her dearest; a bouquet-image that was exhibited for 15 years and now survives the war.