STORIES OF KINDNESS is a documentary project created in 2022–2023 in collaboration with Viktoriia Shyfer. Developed over three months, the project brought together 25 interviews, portraits, and short real-life narratives reflecting acts of care and support offered to Ukrainian refugees who found temporary shelter in Konstanz.
The project focuses on lived experiences of solidarity across borders — between people of different ages, nationalities, languages, religions, and social backgrounds. Through conversations and portraits, it documents how gestures of help, empathy, and presence can become essential forms of human connection in times of rupture and forced displacement.
Rather than presenting kindness as an abstract idea, the project approaches it as a lived social practice — something expressed through attention, responsibility, and concrete acts of support.
Context
The project emerged in response to the war in Ukraine and the arrival of displaced Ukrainians in Konstanz. In this context, we wanted to record not only stories of loss and upheaval, but also the human responses that made survival, orientation, and adaptation possible.
Through meetings, interviews, and photographic encounters, Stories of Kindness preserves testimonies of support offered by individuals from Konstanz, Germany, and Switzerland to Ukrainian refugees rebuilding their lives in an unfamiliar environment.
These stories reveal how solidarity can take shape through everyday gestures: offering shelter, assistance, time, care, translation, companionship, or simply the willingness to be present.
Form
The result of the project was a unique eco-designed set containing 25 short stories from real life, accompanied by portraits and documentary material. Each story reflects a specific encounter and makes visible the often quiet, unrecognized forms of care that sustain people during crisis and transition.
Artistic Position
For me, this project is part of a broader documentary and artistic practice centered on vulnerability, human dignity, and the ways people continue to live through disruption, displacement, and uncertainty.
In Stories of Kindness, I was interested not only in what happened to people, but in what happens between people — how care appears, how trust is rebuilt, and how fragile forms of connection can become a foundation for resilience.
Outcome
The project contributes to a wider reflection on empathy, mutual support, and social cohesion. It seeks to preserve evidence that solidarity is not abstract, but lived — quietly, concretely, and often without public recognition.
At its core, Stories of Kindness is about the human capacity to respond to crisis not only with fear or distance, but with presence, generosity, and responsibility toward others.
