“Mama” is the first — and possibly the only — zine by IDINAHUI PUBLISHING, made by photographer Hristina Novykova (better known as Hristina Zhopa) and graphic designer Volodymyr Khomenko. It tells the story of Hristina’s mother, Alyona, through her personal photos and the tender yet everyday messages she sends from occupied Mariupol — many of them full of a mother’s worry for her child, especially in the first days of the full-scale invasion.

Alyona’s selfies were first shown in Hristina’s photo project “Pepsi/Cola” about her divorced parents (her father loves Cola, her mother Pepsi), and later at the debut IDI NAHUI exhibition in Katya Khadyko’s flat: at home, at work in a grocery store, sometimes in a new negligee, sometimes without her teeth. After two months of deathly silence she got in touch to say that she and their home had survived. Hristina took her to Italy, then she lived in Lviv — but however safe the place, she always wanted to go back to Mariupol, even with almost nothing left of it.

In her messages she muses on loneliness and her fate, and reports on her escapist pleasures — sugaring, tanning, cleaning the flat several times a day, watching romance series in a spotless home — in personal, sometimes glamorous, sometimes absurd photos. The zine carries on IDI NAHUI’s folk discourse: the personal becomes common, and private photos speak about global things — the distance between parents and children and life under occupation — without drama and with irony.