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Once a Year the Stick Shoots (signed)

by Nastasiia Leliuk & Natalia Wiernik

Photographs: Natalia Wiernik

Text: Yevheniia Moliar, Arkadiusz Półtorak

Publisher: Blow Up Press

104 pages

Pictures: 78

Year: 2025

Price: 48 €

Comments: First edition of 850 copies. Soft with cloth-covered spine. Papers: Koehler Eco Black (cover), Munken Print White 1.8 (inside). Format: 225x165 mm. Book Design: Aneta Kowalczyk. signed by Natalia Wiernik.

Branches or weapons? Nature or violence? Childhood imagination or brutal reality? This book poses questions that resist simple answers.

once a year the stick shoots is a powerful photographic project created by two female photographers — Nastasiia Leliuk (Ukraine) and Natalia Wiernik (Poland) — who together explore how war shapes our perception of imagery, language, and symbols. Coming from different contexts but sharing a similar sensitivity, they construct a visual manifesto of memory, resistance, and empathy.

The title is a play on words. In English, “to shoot” means both “to sprout” and “to fire a weapon.” In this duality lies the heart of their narrative — about violence and about life continuing even in the darkest of times. Set against a stark black background — like a stage stripped of scenery — the photographs are striking and evocative: branches that resemble rifles, placed beside images of real guns and assault weapons, instruments of actual destruction. This visual contrast unsettles, provokes thought, and confronts the innocence of childhood play with the cruelty of war. The photographers oppose the natural gesture of growth to the destructive gesture of violence.

Spring 2022 — a time usually associated with hope and renewal — was, for the residents of Bucha, Irpin, Sumy, and Kharkiv, the beginning of a horror that continues to this day. For many Ukrainians, the first buds of spring became not a symbol of life, but a backdrop for fear, trauma, and death.

Yet Wiernik and Leliuk’s book does not document war directly — it speaks to its consequences embedded in the everyday, in language, in imagination. It shows how a child’s game with a stick can carry the weight of war memories. And how, today, it is hard to find a language precise enough to speak of pain — and tender enough not to cause it anew. It reveals how deeply violence can pierce everyday life — even when it appears innocent on the surface.

This symbolic act of violence is inscribed not only in the photographs — it becomes part of the book’s physical form. A single hole pierces through the entire publication, like a bullet shot from one of the rifles shown within. This gesture transforms the book into more than a collection of images and words — it becomes a wounded object, a silent witness, a tangible trace of trauma. This collaborative project belongs to what Hal Foster described as traumatic realism — an attempt to symbolically convey trauma that defies representation.

Still, this is not a book about helplessness. On the contrary — it is a book about resistance. About memory. About how an image — when it meets a sensitive viewer — can become a powerful voice of protest. Art does not resolve conflict, but it can preserve the fragile. It can restore meaning to images that have lost their innocence. It can bear witness.

The project is inspired by the 2022 work Once a Year the Stick Shoots by Nastasiia Leliuk and developed by Natalia Wiernik. The original work was first presented as an installation in the 2023 exhibition HOW ARE YOU, a continuation of the Welcome project curated by Natalia Wiernik.

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