ANTHROPOPHAGE

Yona Tukuser was born in 1986 to a Bulgarian family in the village of Glavan, 70 km away from the Danube Delta in Ukraine. She studied at the Izmail Humanitarian State University in Ukraine (2003-2007) graduating with a bachelor’s degree in fine arts and at the National Academy of Arts in Sofia (2007-2010) where she obtained a master’s degree in painting.
Since 2009, Yona began her independent historical investigation using a scientific-artistic approach in the study of a catastrophe that occurred after the Second World War in the Soviet Union and most violently manifested itself in the region where in which she was born in Ukraine - Bessarabia (Odessa region).
"For 13 years I have been collecting documents from archives in Ukraine, I have also conducted conversations with famine survivors of more than 80 witnesses who shared that they witnessed mass cannibalism in the region. I recorded the conversations with them on a video camera and created a documentary called "Anthropophage". The stories bear witness to the severe consequences of the violent hunger to which people were subjected and its final phase - anthropophagy.
The results of the study on the subject, along with newly discovered documentary sources, are used to recreate the reality of the Soviet famine in Ukraine in the form of metamodern historical paintings.
In these paintings I interpret the tragic consequences of hunger and its reflection on contemporary events in Ukraine."
In 2016 Yona began experimenting with “sound painting” as part of the Anthropophage project. In 2021 she released the conceptual music album with the same name, which includes 21 electronic sound improvisations created in Rome from 2016-2021. The album is inspired by real stories collected by Yona about famine and cannibalism in Ukraine in the 20th century. Her research has also resulted in several articles that were published in scientific contexts.