West of the Birch Trees
In this series, Anastasia Miseyko explores the layered construction of belonging through themes of displacement, memory, and cultural hybridity. Drawing on her personal experience of being born in Ukraine yet raised in Spain, she interrogates how the notion of home becomes both a metaphor and an infrastructurally fragile condition that often comes with migration.
Born in Ukraine in the mid-1990s and raised in Spain from early childhood, I start this work from a place long familiar to me: movement—not just across borders, but across languages, systems of meaning, ways of remembering, and uncertain definitions of "home". For many migrants, this movement is not episodic but foundational. As such, the relationship to place is not inherited, but provisional. What happens to the idea of "home" when it is no longer a fixed place but an unstable, ongoing negotiation? A "home" that is not just metaphorical, but infra-structurally fragile? One does not inherit property where one’s family never owned any, and the stability of domestic space is often subject to external, bureaucratic, and economic forces. In that respect, "home" is both a longing and a logistical concern, both a non-place and a contested one—vulnerable to legal precarity, housing insecurity, and a lack of intergenerational rootedness.
In this light, West Of The Birch Trees explores how visual and narrative strategies can document, evoke, and complicate identity construction within contexts of displacement. To do so, I go back to Ukraine—both as a lived experience and a conceptual ground—an act that is at once political, emotional, and methodological. How does the experience of migration challenge linear notions of memory and storytelling? And how can the act of returning—physically, emotionally, and visually—reshape and deepen one’s understanding of belonging through photography? These questions are not merely thematic. They operate as both conceptual and methodological frameworks that inform the structure and pace of this work. West Of The Birch Trees does not follow a strictly linear narrative. It doesn't document the past or trace it chronologically. Instead, it unfolds cyclically, it returns, it repeats—a central motif that recurs not only in the content but in the form. This use of repetition—of scenes, symbols, rhythms—is not accidental; it reflects the way memory itself works, non-linear and recursive, and the way diasporic life is often organised around retelling, re-translation, and re-orientation. To return, again and again, does not happen in search of closure but in recognition of what continues to shift. To return, not in the search for certainty, but for intimacy. A kind of intimacy that photography, in its fragmentary and persistent nature, is uniquely equipped to hold. It's not about reclaiming the past, but about confronting the absence within it—and articulating that absence through visual and textual language.
Photography is not treated here as mere documentation. Rather, it operates as a relational gesture—an analogue to proximity itself. The camera allows for attention, for presence, for being-with, but it also introduces questions of authorship, framing, and distance. Thus, the photographs allow for the kind of layered, unresolved seeing that aligns with the project’s refusal of simple belonging. There is no neutral way to look, and certainly no neutral way to return. It is a relational, embodied practice—a way of being-with.
Throughout the project, I position myself not only as photographer and writer, but as participant, subject, and mediator. I am both recording and remembered. West Of The Birch Trees takes inspiration from auto-ethnographic and anthropological practices that embrace the first person not as confessional, but as critically situated. To speak from the “I” here is to reveal the scaffolding of the gaze—to show who is looking, and from where. Rather than positioning myself outside the frame, I acknowledge my entanglement in it. I am not merely documenting my surroundings; I am implicated in them. In this sense, the telling of one’s story is never fully autonomous, but formed in relational exchange.
This is not a document of a place or a family, nor an attempt to find a definitive version of home. It is, instead, a practice of circling—of moving closer to the elusive, ambiguous spaces between memory and image, belonging and estrangement. It invites the reader somewhere amid seeing and knowing, amid distance and intimacy. To be close, after all, is not the same as to understand. But perhaps it’s a start.
Anastasia Miseyko (1996, Ukraine) is a photographer and writer based in The Hague. Her work explores belonging, memory, and identity through a practice rooted in migration and cultural hybridity. Combining photography and writing, she treats both mediums as relational and partially performative gestures that challenge fixed narratives. Her work favours cyclical forms and intimacy over resolution, seeking connection through personal storytelling and layered visual language.
Website: anastasiamiseyko.com