Is it possible to truly empathise with someone from a war-torn country if you haven't shared that experience yourself? French-born Guillaume Bihan wondered this when he and Daria Svertilova, from Ukraine, began sharing a Paris flat in February 2022, just as Russia launched its full-scale invasion. They barely had furniture, and Svertilova had just left her boyfriend.

On a macro level, the war has rocked geopolitics. But it has impacted individuals on a micro level, too. Bihan and Svertilova met while at a photography course at École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. As flatmates, they discussed the chilling situation in Ukraine, but Bihan felt he could not truly share Svertilova’s anxiety and grief as a native citizen of Odesa. With this in mind, in 2025 the duo decided to embark on a journey together, using the Danube – a major river connecting ten European countries – as a geographical thread. Once a frontier of the Roman Empire, the Danube flows from the Black Forest of Germany south through the Danube Delta in Romania and into the Black Sea. 

Having been awarded a contemporary documentary photography grant, they set out in a van with no fixed timeline. Their photographic touchstones for the project were Justine Kurland and Jeff Wall, citing their ability to create “really well-composed” photos that felt like documentary, even though they were staged.

They started from Donaueschingen in Germany and went to Passau, Linz, Vienna, Bratislava, Dalj, Novi Sad, Cetate, Tulcea, Izmail, and Sulina – among other places. The trip lasted from June to August, wrapping up when the weather got cold and people would no longer hang out near the river (and their grant money ran out). They pinned places on their map to see what was accessible by car, but otherwise, decided to pursue a more spontaneous approach. 

Using Instagram, they searched hashtags in each city to see if they could unearth interesting people, but this ultimately proved unhelpful. Svertilova says they approached the project as “foreigners”: “we didn’t speak the language of the country and didn’t do a lot of research. But I understood that even if you do research about a place, when you arrive, it’s different – every time."

Until this project, Svertilova had never done street casting; her documentary practice had always involved working with friends, friends of friends, or people she has explicitly reached out to on Instagram (in addition to her commissioned work for newspapers like Libération). “[At first] I tried to contact people I knew and find some people through them,” she said, but this failed to get them the results they’d hoped for. Eventually, they figured out how to engage with strangers. 

They were looking for people hanging out by the river, with no fixed criteria beyond youth and good energy, choosing who to approach based on their behaviour and how they dressed. Sometimes, those they were intrigued by were sizing them up as well – the creative duo stood out with their analogue cameras and tripods, and these accessories helped them to strike up conversations.

They often worked fast, due to the fast pace of their young subjects and dimming natural light – they scouted from late afternoon to evening, because that was when teenagers materialised. Some wanted to “see” the images, not grasping that they weren’t digital. The photographers used long exposure times in the dusky settings, and developed contact sheets along the way to review their work. Their final edit was formed in back in Paris, where they made their prints.

The journey provided a range of experiences. “Bratislava [Slovakia] was really generous,” Svertilova says. A lot of people they encountered spoke English, and there were many young artists. In Vukovar [Croatia], they saw traces of bullets on the facades of buildings. In Serbia, they happened upon student protests and unrest on campuses. Many people they encountered came from disadvantaged backgrounds and experienced the brunt of unspoken – or spoken – hierarchies between nations and countries. In Ulm, in southwestern Germany, they met young weed dealers who had already run into trouble with the law.

In light of all this, the images reflect latent “tension, violence, intimacy”, said Svertilova. The war in Ukraine was felt as a storm on the horizon. More and more people expressed discomfort and fear the closer they got to Svertilova’s home country.

Although the expedition is over now, Bihan wants to invite local photographers to collaborate and establish a “think tank” focused on understanding the state of Europe through the lens of art. “The continent is in a critical state,” he said, which makes critical the importance of projects that “fight against fascism with the idea of community.”