District

100 pages
24.5x31 centimetres
Clothbound hardcover
40 duotone plates + 4 color plates on coated paper
Limited run of 200 copies, each one is numbered by hand

District is a debut book, published by Syntax in Kyiv, Ukraine. It consists of two parts: a visual series of photographs by Vladyslav Andrievsky titled District and a textual part in the form of an essay by Olha Pavlenko, Prince of his own pattern.

As the author explains, photographic research focuses on a big city’s outskirts, where dark, gray, and concrete reality exists to express the mind and soul. The main interest is focused on the phenomenon of dreaming that lives between these faceless surroundings wrapped in depressing, gloomy, and faceless environments versus the young generation with bright minds and pure hearts. The story is about the tension between the outskirts and young people growing up in the Internet reality. The environment is a kind of everyday life battlefield searching for a Dream. And a dream is the only thing that can provide faith and hope. Meanwhile, an essay by Olha Pavlenko, Prince of his own pattern, adds a lyrical hero to the book, revealing the essence of his persona and reflecting on the line between unbearable lightness and absolute heaviness, which is where the main lyricism of the character is hidden.

District book appears as a result of a sentimental journey by the process of looking through dreaming landscapes, full of emotions, belonging both to the buildings and faces trapped inside each other. Where the landscape is something nearest to the infinitely distant, and a Dream seems so fragile that you sometimes abandon it in your sleep.