Two European cultural workers, curator Sofia Baldi Pighi and philosopher Leonardo Caffo, recently spent ten days in Kyiv mapping the local art scene and creating a constellation of interviews that convey the cultural atmosphere of the Ukrainian capital during the full-scale Russian invasion. It was their second trip to Ukraine since the February 2022 invasion.
Sofia Baldi Pighi tells us more
During our stay, together with philosopher and friend Leonardo Caffo, we created a sort of constellation of Kyiv’s art scene—a mapping of the city composed of artists, intellectuals, researchers, curators, cultural workers, actors, screenwriters, publishers, and poets who remained in Kyiv.
The constellation, necessarily incomplete, emerged through a series of encounters, visits, and interviews conducted in person – ten questions for everyone, always the same. Simple questions about daily life and care, projects for an uncertain future or reflections on the here and now, guided a process of forced liberation from the neutralization of human violence. Ukrainian artists are not monuments to something, but someones with singular stories that transcend the national and historical interests they found themselves, often unwillingly, called to represent.
OOZ Kharkiv is the name of the research project we imagined; from the interviews and field investigations a future exhibition will be curated in collaboration with the Yermilov Center in Kharkiv, along with an international publication.
If Europe only engages with the Ukrainian art scene within the conceptual confines of war – reducing artists to animals locked in conceptual cages – the OOZ Kharkiv project attempts to invert this idea of a “zoo”, shifting attention to the people and their stories, “not in war, but through it.”
Below is a series of things I didn’t know about war before this trip. A sequence of reflections and considerations I was unaware of even after my first trip to Ukraine, and which only came into focus during this second stay. The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, in Infancy and History (1978), criticizes how modernity has separated abstract knowledge from lived experience: “Experience is not something one has, but something that happens to us,” he writes. What follows are embodied insights, born from my emotional, political, and professional reaction. As a curator, every path of research and investigation is done hand in hand with the works and the artists I encountered on this journey.
The work You Shouldn’t Have to See This by the artist duo Yarema Malashchuk and Roman Khimei portrays several Ukrainian children who were deported to Russia and later returned to Ukraine. Russia has been deporting children from Ukraine to its own territories since 2014, at the onset of the Russo-Ukrainian war. Estimates on the number of such cases range from 20,000 to over a million. Malashchuk and Khimei draw attention to this war crime while simultaneously portraying childhood in wartime. The crimes of the Russian empire generate a collective sorrow that is difficult for us Europeans – accustomed to peace – to even imagine.
Things I Didn’t Know – Telegram and the war
War, and life in wartime, are much more intertwined with Telegram than I had imagined. Almost every resident of Kyiv is subscribed to at least three or four Telegram channels dedicated to the war, with a territorial stratification that goes from the national level down to individual neighborhoods and even streets.
Within Telegram groups, semi-automated bots communicate in real time the type of missile, its trajectory, and potential impact zone.For those living in Kyiv, the experience translates into a micro-geography of protection: “from the perspective of someone in Milan, it’s as if a missile launched from Porta Romana were targeting NoLo.” Close, but not close enough to flee. And anyway, after three years of uninterrupted alarms, the perception of danger has changed in ways that are hard to rationalize for those privileged enough to live in peace. Unlike other mainstream, market-driven social platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, or WhatsApp, Telegram is based on shared servers and a decentralized logic.
Main army channels – like Monitor – Ukraine or the Ukrainian Armed Forces Air Force group (marked with the national flag) – communicate directly with citizens, acting as a kind of civic-military radar. Alongside these official accounts, there are more informal and even ironic ones: “Shahed hide under umbrellas,” someone/something writes during a drone attack on a rainy day—blending the tone of survival with irony.
Telegram bots have rapid computational capabilities: they gather bottom-up reports, cross-reference them with radar data, and send out immediate alerts. Citizens actively contribute: “I saw it,” “I heard it,” and the bot processes the information.
Military competence is distributed across the population, turning the local into an infrastructure of decentralized resistance. In this war, Telegram functions as a collective sensory organ, contributing to the ongoing mapping of risk – a distributed machine for prediction and reaction.
In a conflict where the time between alarm and impact may be just a few minutes, Telegram is the speed required for survival. And yet it is also an archive of trauma – a space where notifications pile up like layers of collective memory.
Reactions to chats through emojis – most commonly fire, crying face, heart, and raised fist – form a system of semiotic participation: a parallel, immediate, communal emotional language. Each missile is coded with symbols; each alert comes with visualizations showing community impact. Thus, Telegram – through flags, tridents, and national colours – represents a form of affective resistance, a source of information, and a network of distributed solidarity.
Things I didn’t know – bad weather in wartime
In a country at war, bad weather doesn’t just affect daily logistics as it might in Milan. It’s not merely the nuisance of deciding whether to carry an umbrella, take the bus, or walk.
It’s not just that mental fog familiar to those, like me, who are weather-sensitive. In war, rain changes everything.
Low clouds, thunderstorms, and heavy rain impact military defense capabilities.
When it rains, radar sensors struggle more, thermal cameras get saturated, and drones “can’t see.” Ukrainian drones have a harder time intercepting X-shahed, those low-flying Russian drones that strike at night. When the sky is overcast, they hide – they become ghosts. The sky is no longer just a backdrop – it becomes a semantic space on which your entire day depends. Today, as I write, it’s pouring rain across Northern Italy. And so, I think of Kyiv, of rain that disrupts signals, weakens the radar network, fogs the lens of defense.
Bad weather alters your sense of security – it rewrites it in real time. When the sky closes in, your body closes too. You don’t know if it’s the weather or the war, but your senses heighten. In peacetime, rain is just weather. In wartime, the atmosphere is strategy, danger, emotional geography. Bad weather in war is a warning from the sky – a vulnerability that infiltrates radar systems and bones alike.
Things I didn’t know – art and weapons
“Я завтра поговорю з кураторами можливо у них вже є хороша візуальна фіксація проекту. Я зараз в армії, але як раз приїхав в Київ, маю відпустку.”
“Tomorrow I’ll talk to the curators, maybe they already have good visual documentation of the project. I’m currently in the army, but I just arrived in Kyiv, I’m on leave.”
In Kyiv, the cultural scene flourishes despite the war. Every week a new exhibition opens, there are performances, magazine launches, and bookstores opening. Some even say it feels like the “new Berlin.” But the difference is radical: here, art is not leisure – it is militancy. It is part of a widespread resistance that responds to the immediate needs of the community. Art does not represent the war: it crosses through it, carves into it, and reshapes it into forms of care and fundraising. Many artists are now enlisted. Others support them by selling their work to fund ammunition, gear, and medicine. Artistic practice becomes one of many forms of survival logistics.
In Dust Cures by Yevhen Korshunov, presented at the PinchukArtCentre, this double bond between art and life is exposed in its rawest form. The work stems directly from the artist’s personal experience during his military training. The faces drawn on the walls are trench companions, with their quirks, their stories, their ways of staying human while dust, rats, and dampness fill every space. The work moves between extreme discomfort and deep intimacy, offering a multifaceted image of the soldier – not an abstract figure, but a face, a voice, a body coughing alongside a hundred others every morning in the freezing cold. Art here does not idealize; it documents and disarms, bringing human micro-stories to the surface, buried under wartime rhetoric.
But art in Ukraine is not just testimony: it is active reconstruction. Theater of Hopes and Expectations, a project by the Prykarpattya Theater collective (including Yarema Malashchuk and Roman Khimei), is a clear example. Born as a temporary pavilion built in Düsseldorf with discarded theater scenographies, the space hosted exhibitions, concerts, and discussions. Later, it was dismantled and transported to Ukraine, where it became an actual house for the displaced Honchar family from the Kyiv region. A simple yet powerful gesture: transforming a work of art into a shelter, an aesthetic object into an infrastructure of solidarity.
These projects do not ask war to stay out of art, but rather allow art to be traversed by it – so it can change. In this context, the artist is neither commentator nor observer: they are a bond-maker, a network-builder, a narrator of minute stories, and a tool of cohesion. In Ukraine today, to make art is to make space – literally. A space for voices, for memory, for living bodies, for dreams that resist. And this might be the most urgent role of art in wartime: not only to give form to pain but to produce the conditions for a future peace, rooted in care, listening, and the ability to rebuild together.
Imagining war from home – how would you feel if they bombed our cultural heritage?
In trying to imagine war from home, thinking about cultural heritage can help.
How would you feel if our cultural heritage were bombed? How would you feel if they bombed your favorite statue, the dome of a church, or your beloved museum? Can you imagine that nearly every day, the history stored in the places that shape your identity is at risk?
In Russian Rocket (2022), Ukrainian artist Zhanna Kadyrova performs a simple yet striking gesture: applying a sticker of a Russian missile on the window of a bus, tram, train, or ferry.
Suddenly, the missile seems to fly over your city. Your streets. Your schools. Your museums. The sticker is a visual parasite that adapts to any urban context and contaminates it by doing so. War – usually confined to screens and geographic distance – enters the glass of our lives, overlaying our world with the same brutality it brings to Ukraine.
Russian Rocket is a mobile and participatory artwork, able to insert itself anywhere. The vehicle becomes the frame; the passing landscape, the backdrop.
Russian Rocket is a device of emotional dislocation, democratic in its reach: anyone can join in, apply it, photograph it, share it. Art goes viral not by strategy, but by necessity: it serves to show what is normally hidden, displaced, off-screen.
In a time when war is filtered through algorithms and geopolitics, Russian Rocket reminds us that no place is truly safe, as long as one is under attack. And it is on the glass that separates us from the missile – that window turned threshold – where the ethics of vision are played out: are you a spectator or a target?
Bombing a museum means bombing memory. To bomb a museum, a library, a theatre, or a church means to attack what gives meaning, roots, and history to a community. To defend a museum, a work of art, or an archaeological site means to defend a common language, a shared heritage, a possible ground for reconciliation.
This is why Odessa, in the midst of war, was declared a UNESCO site – thanks in part to Italy’s diplomatic efforts: because heritage protection is a political act, a moral form of resistance to violence. Cultural heritage during war is never a “collateral” target – it is always strategic, always symbolic. And so is its epistemological activation in peace-building practices.
The artwork Explosions Near the Museum by Yarema Malashchuk and Roman Khimei tells the story of the Kherson Local History Museum, looted by Russian troops between October 24 and 26, 2022, just before their retreat. With real recorded bombings in the background (not studio recreations but live sounds, recorded less than two kilometers from the front), the museum was emptied of its treasures. The systematic theft of over 173,000 artifacts was not accidental: it was an operation of identity erasure, an attempt to rewrite history through looting. They don’t only attack people. They attack the possibility of narrating, of recognizing oneself, of existing in time. It is a war against memory.
This is why protecting heritage is not a neutral gesture – it is a deeply political act: it builds the symbolic and moral foundations of peace. “Since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defenses of peace must be constructed,” reads the preamble to UNESCO’s constitution. To protect cultural heritage is to preserve the very possibility of imagining a future.
Imagining war from home – the role of sound
In trying to imagine war from home, thinking about sound – the noises we typically hear in a day – can help. Beyond traffic, birdsong for the lucky ones, and the varied calls of religious rituals, the relationship we have with sound reveals much about the history of the place we’re in. Since moving to Malta, an archipelago in the central Mediterranean, I’ve begun to question how sound operates in public space and how much of that relationship stems from a specific historical relationship with war and bombing. During World War II, for example, Malta – then a British colony – was intensely bombed. Today, the presence of fireworks and loud explosions in public space is constant in summer, from 8 in the morning under the blazing sun until late at night.
Two Ukrainian artists I deeply admire, Nikita Kadan and the Open Group collective, through their works Tryvoha (Sirens and the Mast) and Repeat After Me II respectively, explore the sonic colonization of war in Ukraine’s daily cultural atmosphere. The sound of war is an incursion into the physical and emotional space of people. In Tryvoha, installed in a church in Ypres in 2023, Kadan built a circular structure made of translucent fabric and light steel that invites the public inside. It’s a fragile, welcoming, almost liturgical space. But inside, one is struck by a sharp, piercing sound: the air raid siren – the signal that in Ukraine means “imminent danger.” It’s a sound that shatters thought, entering the body before the mind.
The sound composition – created by Roman Grygoriv and Illia Razumeiko, with the voice of mezzo-soprano Lena Bielkina and the violin of Ihor Zavhorodnii – transforms fear into an aesthetic experience. In doing so, it brings the war into a European cultural space, forcing Western viewers to feel the interruption of the everyday on their own skin.
In Repeat After Me II, presented at the 2024 Venice Biennale, Open Group brings war into a military karaoke setting. Ukrainian refugees – civilians, not soldiers – recall the sounds of the weapons that struck them. They don’t describe them – they repeat them: machine gun fire, missile launches, explosions. The audience is invited to do the same. To learn the grammar of conflict, a sonic language of survival. Karaoke – typically a playful, social tool – becomes a traumatic device.
Both works show that sound is never neutral. In war, sound is power; it is a control system, a threshold of panic. But it can also become a tool of resistance.
In Tryvoha and Repeat After Me II, listening is never passive – it is a political act, an action. Those who listen participate. Those who listen allow themselves to be moved through.
These works remind me of another artist I love, Hiwa K, a Kurdish-Iraqi artist I discovered through my friend, artist Fabio Roncato. In The Bell Project, Hiwa K collects remnants of used weapons and melts them down into a bell, transforming instruments of destruction into a collective sonic object. Throughout European history, bells have marked danger, unity, and celebration. Hiwa K reclaims their archetypal function, but using war material. Each toll is a solidified memory that resounds. Sound, in this context, works at the edge between personal experience and collective trauma, between auditory memory and possible futures.
In all three cases, sound acts as a bridge between what happens elsewhere and what happens here, between those who have lived through war and those who can only imagine it. And you – are you already listening?
After 16 hours on a bus and 7 at the Ukraine–Poland border, Leonardo and I made it home safe. This trip taught us that this war is also our war.
What is being defended in Ukraine right now, under the full-scale invasion of the Russian Empire, is also a threat to my European life, to my peaceful Sunday in the park.
I know that from here, Russia feels far away, and that territorial proximity affects our perception of danger – but walking through Kyiv on a sunny Sunday, I rediscovered my life, and our lives as European citizens.
At the border of Europe, there is more Europe than I ever imagined. There is gender respect, freedom of thought, a queer scene, musical experimentation, and political debate.
What the Russian Empire fears is not NATO – it is a cultural and collective rights movement.
Tiziano Terzani wrote in Letters from Kabul: “It is time to come out into the open; it is time to take a stand for the values we believe in. A civilization strengthens itself through moral determination much more than through new weapons.”
After this second trip to Ukraine, I am convinced: as European cultural workers, it is our responsibility to take a stand. The Ukrainian resistance is defending a cultural vision, and we are called to help protect it. It is time to make peace.
Sofia Baldi Pighi
