West of the Birch Trees
West Of The Birch Trees addresses how experiences of migration shape one’s sense of belonging. Combining photography, text, and archival material, the work reflects on how the meaning of “home” is negotiated when continuity across countries, languages, and generations is interrupted. The project understands belonging as something continuously shaped through distance, absence, repetition, and return.
Structured around several journeys between Spain and Ukraine, the act of returning operates both as method and metaphor for examining diasporic experience. Within this cyclical movement, identity is approached not as stable or inherited, but as something continuously reshaped through encounters with places marked by political instability and personal memory. In this sense, the work approaches belonging not as a singular event, but as an ongoing condition shaped by migration, geopolitical conflict, and the reconfiguration of cultural identity.
The project focuses on rural and semi-rural environments in western and central Ukraine, where relationships to place persist despite displacement and the fragmentation of family structures. Through extended time on site, photography becomes a relational practice that allows connections between people, landscape, and memory to emerge gradually.
Selected archival material introduces additional temporal layers, allowing past and present to coexist within the visual structure of the work. Through the interaction of image, text, and archive, West of the Birch Trees considers how both identity and photographic meaning remain in continuous transformation across time and context.
Anastasía Miseyko (1996) is a photographer and writer born in Kirovohrad, Ukraine and raised (mostly) in Spain. With a background in journalism and photojournalism, her practice has gradually shifted toward slower, relationship-based forms of storytelling that prioritise intimacy and long-term engagement. Her work explores themes of belonging and identity, blending image and text to situate personal histories within broader cultural and political narratives.
