Bud’mo

Commissioned and first shown at the Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin, Bud’mo takes its title from a Ukrainian toast meaning “let us be.” The work was filmed in two forests in Western Ukraine: Chornyi Lis, where Soviet troops executed and buried hundreds of prisoners during the Second World War, and Bronitskyi Lis near Drohobych, where German forces carried out mass killings of the local population.

The genesis of the work reaches back more than a decade, when the artist’s first child loved to walk in a Berlin cemetery. Lying on his back in the stroller, he was captivated by the view of the sky through dense trees. Kaabi-Linke noticed that the trees there grew unusually close and strong, nourished by the bodies buried beneath them. It was a revelation: life and death not in opposition, but feeding one another, interwoven.

Years later in Ukraine, she encountered forests of the same beauty—yet marked by massacre, where thousands were killed and hastily buried. Filming from the upward perspective of a child, she also evokes the last vision of those who perished beneath the canopy: the sky fractured by branches before the eyes close forever.

Projected onto the floor like a reflection on water, the moving image envelops viewers in an unstable space: disorienting, immersive, at once peaceful and unsettling. Bud’mo is not about accusation or revenge, but about transforming darkness into light—acknowledging pain, honoring the dead, and finding in nature and memory the possibility of continuity, forgiveness, and renewal.

As we finally reached our destination, we got stuck in the mud. Chorniy Lis – black woods in English – was where we wanted to shoot the first images for Bud’mo. A muddy path between farmland and a graveyard was the only way; without the digger that pulled our film truck step by step, we would have had no chance to get there. Then, on the horizon where the fields between Demjaniw Las and Chorniy Lis touched the sky, we saw the figure of a man approaching slowly. He came closer, took his time for a short chat with a goatherd nearby, and then came over to our truck. He had been looking for horseradish. Look what I found, he said. He was carrying a heavy shell covered in dirt. It was hard to dig up the ground. The fields were still full of stuff like this. The metal was heavily weathered and sticky with mud. Hard to tell whose shot it was. Germans? Russians? Ukrainian partisans? First or Second World War, who knows? And who would care, anyway, he said. The only thing that mattered to him was that it was still in the soil that should nourish the people who lived here. And, while looking for horseradish, it had always bothered him.
He laughed and moved on a few steps. Then he rummaged through his pockets and turned around. I also found these, he said, showing us a handful of bullet casings. They’re not that old, he said. They’re for sure of Soviet origin.

— Timo Kaabi-Linke