Tuesday 31 July 2018
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Co-founder of the Femen movement and a painter died on July 23rd.
The announcement of her death was made public by Inna Shevchenko, the current leader of the Femen movement.
"Oksana Chatchko is one of the most remarkable women in our time one of the biggest fighters having fought hard against the injustices which she had to face. Oksana left us but she is here and everywhere. She is within each of us who stood by her side, she is in Femen whom she cofounded. She is in her paintings through which she expressed her artistic talents. She is in the history of feminism."
Among Femen, she was not in the most mediatized one in France.
But she was the most brillant, artistic, atypical, radical, anarchistic.
Ukrainian Oksana Chatchko, aged 31, was found hung at her home on Monday, July 23rd, in her small apartment in a Parisian suburb. For several days, the painter had no longer given news, her friends worried. She left a political letter, simply denouncing the hypocrisy of society and men. It was not her first suicide attempt.
To Inna Schevchenko, whose group is always active even if the actions have trouble in having the same reach, media glory and rewards. To Oksana Chatchko, precariousness, squats, problems to renew her amnistrative documents, dire straits. “It was a complicated life in Paris” tells on the telephone with a voice full of tears her friend, artist Apolonia Breuil, who had welcomed political refugees in her alternative theater of the XVIIth district, Le Lavoir Moderne , which is closed today.
We have lived in the same squat bed for five years, she became like my sister. She had eventually found a quite small place to stayin Montrouge, with nothing, no decoration, except for the closet in which she hung herself. It is very hard. Life was very hard.
Oksana Chatchko and Inna Schevchenko had hardly spoken to each other for more three years.
If they had known each other in Ukraine, Inna having joined the group Femen secondly, their successive arrivals to Paris, in 2012, had pulled serious quarrels, dissensions and internal conflicts. They didn’t agree on the various methods to be adopted, Inna, more a strategist and a political activist, had little by little taken the power , opposed to the more romantic, more anarchistic Oksana also, who didn’t believe pyramidal organizations. Until the break in 2014 and the de facto exclusion of Oksana and an other one of the founders, Sasha Shevchenko.
Apolonia Breuil: “people cannot understand what she went through.”
- Arrests in Ukraine by the police or in Belarus by them political services, treasons from her friends.
In 2014, while both friends attended together a theater performance in Le Lavoir Moderne, in Paris, a man,with a skinhead look had entered and had stabbed two people, leaving them in a serious condition. He aimed at Femen, who alerady no longer lived there.
“It was before violent attempts, that one bacame aware of all this. we had not been supported..We went back to Le Lavoir Moderne and we had to mop the blood, on the ground, alone », remembers Apolonia. We were deeply touched. Oksana thought the people had been attacked because of her.”
- Source - Quentin Girard - liberation.fr - Translation by Simple Mind.
Crowdfunding to support Oksana’s family.
Dear friends. As you know it, our daughter, sister, friend, colleague, our dear Oksana Chatchko has left us. She was a remarkable, engaged person, an activist and a militant, co-founder of Femen mouvement, a model of bravery, who held strong beliefs. She was a very soft person and a great artist.
We have set up this crowdfunding to support Oksana’s family. All the money will be used for proceedings linked to the body and the ceremony, and also for the family’s needs during these moments.Thank you.
The persons in charge of the crowdfunding are:
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Apolonie Sokol - apolonia.sokolgmail.com -
Alain Margot - alainmargotgmail.com
