Water, Air, Earth, Obstacle?

After the invasion of Ukraine, many cultural practitioners and artists were faced with the question of how to be useful and help our country in its struggle against Russia. We personally found the answer to this question when we arrived in Mykolaiv to volunteer.

Due to constant shelling, the city had been almost entirely abandoned. Many businesses, shops, museums, and educational institutions had closed, while others were simply destroyed. At first, we did not understand how to communicate with local volunteer groups, which were just being formed at the time. Two months later, we were working as part of a large group consisting of military and civilian volunteers. After some complications, we attempted to work with a smaller team, but that did not yield productive results either. We spent a lot of time on communication and very little time on process or results.

Our small team originated in the Odesa arts community that was founded in the abandoned shipyard OSRZ-2. Our approach is largely motivated by environmental concerns, and is practically defined by working with garbage. In 2019, our founder Pavlo launched USE TRASH, an open Telegram channel in major cities around Ukraine where people share unneeded or found objects with each other.1 The building where we first started working together in Odesa had been uninhabitable, and most of the materials we used to make it habitable again were found or recycled from garbage bins around the city.

The original beauty studio workshop after being hit by a rocket.

When we began volunteering in Mykolaiv, we had hoped to come together with different people in one big mission to defend our country. Despite this idea of connection and mutual support under harsh circumstances, we quickly encountered barriers in individuals’ personal desires for comfort and profit. For us, it was difficult to understand how people could hold onto such attitudes and habits during wartime. We felt the need for a separate space where we could work.

The port city of Mykolaiv, which is in the southeast of Ukraine and very close to the frontline, had a lot of empty structures leftover from its past as a center of industrial shipbuilding. A lot of old “concrete boxes” had come to be used as warehouses or small businesses after Ukrainian independence. When we got to Mykolaiv, the city was experiencing frequent shelling. This meant that, when we decided to find a space where we could work on our own, we could rent almost any space we wanted. We chose the fanciest place to work: a beauty studio, with huge mirrors and a big pink sign. But a few days after we leased it, the building was hit by a rocket and destroyed. We soon found another space in the same building and kept the name. We like to think of ourselves as a “beauty studio” whose job is to search for, explore, and find beauty among the ugliness of the present.

Map of volunteering missions conducted by Beauty Studio in and around Mykolaiv and Kherson. Drawing: Dasha Chechushkova.

Water

We ended up in Mykolaiv by way of a happy coincidence. The project that initially brought us here was a campaign by a friend to build surveillance drones in a garbage dump. At the same time, by entering the local community through our volunteering activities, we expanded our circle of contacts. Through our new friends in Mykolaiv, we received requests for help from people who had remained in Kherson. The Mykolaiv region had been liberated, so we decided to go on a reconnaissance mission towards Kherson. In Mykolaiv, there were loud bombardments, but here it was different: entire villages were destroyed, and some people had survived through the occupation without water or electricity.

Water was the most difficult thing for people in Kherson to come by. Our comrades from Mykolaiv, Valik and Serhii, had a small van and a 1000-liter canister with which they brought drinking water once a week. First, it was to the villages of Posad Pokrovske, then to Luch and Myrne. We made two trips with Valik and Serhii to three villages on broken roads. We took water from a friend’s well on the outskirts of Mykolaiv.

Bringing water to people in Kherson with Valik and Serhii.

Of course, we did not only bring water on these trips with Valik and Serhii. These were opportunities to exchange news, impressions, and emotions. The people we saw were generally very open and poured out their souls to us. They were glad to find understanding and support from others. Over the course of numerous visits, we saw how things changed: their thoughts, views, actions, the situation in the community. The war has left an irreparable mark on all of them, but we were able to bring hope. When we visited Kherson on December 5, 2022, we visited a grandmother named Klava and repaired her window. She told us:

First of all, we need to know how to find each other. Without understanding who is around us, we will not be able to communicate. On a primitive level, it is language. On another level, it is feeling each other, and when we feel, we can trust, which is vital now. What does it mean to “feel” each other? It is when we understand each other without words, when people speak with their eyes, gestures, mimicry, and actions. After the coronavirus, people closed themselves off from each other because they were afraid of the law or their safety. And now we are forced into a new era, which forces us to unite for survival. I believe that this is the universe reminding us that we are people who simply forgot about the fact that we are people. Joining groups is an inherent property of ours, of the species Homo sapiens. To create something supernatural. To conquer this universe. To be a mistake of nature, because nature did not plan for this at all. Or vice versa? But no one knows, so we just do what we feel. This is our fate.

The Sky and Me is a 2023 installation made from material collected from the ruins of bombed residential areas, including pieces of torn concrete, bent steel, and charred fragments of musical instruments.

Air

While we were volunteering and doing missions in Mykolaiv and the Kherson region with Valik and Serhii we were still working on our other project, to build a drone. None of us had built anything like an aircraft before, so it was very complicated. We did a lot of things by guesswork, experimented, and made mistakes, but we started learning and were able to accomplish certain things. But then the days started becoming shorter, and the cold came. During this period, our artistic practice became active again. We began to prepare a “monument” to the drone we were making and to all the people involved in the creation of everything that now flies in the sky.

At the same time, we collected clothes, made LED lights, and collected money for generators. We made an instruction manual on how to safely use a standard car battery for household electrical needs, and we distributed it, along with some several lithium 12V batteries, to people in de-occupied areas. These were to help in case of blackouts and through the persistent lack of electricity. Residents of de-occupied villages who did not have electricity on a regular basis could go to neighboring villages or to places where there was, charge the batteries, and return to their homes. Such a battery could hold energy for several days, allowing them to charge their phones and use LED lights.

Beauty Studio, Monument to the Sapper (Vania was here), 2023. Part of the exhibition Let the long. Road. Lead. To. Stairs in. The Heavens at Dnipro Center for Contemporary Culture, Dnipro, Ukraine.

Land

By the end of the winter, people in the villages were already starting to think about springtime, preparing tools and raw materials for sowing. The air gradually began to smell of earth.

Livestock and land are the main resources of Ukrainian villages, and locals know how to use these resources very skillfully. But that spring, all the land was surrounded by barbed wire and filled with signs warning about the danger of mines. The process of demining was slow. Sometimes even sappers would blow themselves up on the mines. Some villagers studied demining instructions on their own and successfully (or, sometimes, not so successfully) cleared their lands.

Our thoughts drifted towards trying to help. There was a special need for a device that could carry out demining the “200s” (Russians would often lay mines under corpses—“Cargo 200” is a military term for a soldier’s corpse left over from the Soviet era), so we developed a project for a mechanical arm attached to a quad bike that could lift a body away without taking any additional lives. At the same time, we began to work on a sculpture. We took the metaphor of a sapper dog as the conceptual base, and added a cybernetic hand.

Wallcatcher is a closed labyrinth made of found materials, through which you can drive a remote-controlled vehicle. A camera attached to the vehicle is connected to first-person view drone glasses and helps explore what’s inside. Exhibited as part of the 2023 Construction Festival at Dnipro Center for Contemporary Culture, Dnipro, Ukraine.

Obstacle?

In the summer of 2023, our Italian friend Ludovico came to Ukraine for the second time. He was our driver and helped with everything he could, collecting money and even bringing more Italians to Ukraine to dispel propaganda that was spreading across Europe. It was Ludo who took our “miner” to the opening of an exhibition in Dnipro, but, on the way, disaster struck.

We stopped by Margarita’s friend in Kryvyi Rih for the night and woke up in the morning to news about the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam and the extensive flooding that followed. Everyone was extremely agitated, especially Margarita, who said that she would go there to save the animals. Ludo and Kjeko also wanted to go, but we persuaded them to go to Dnipro. By the very next day, however, Ludo, Kjeko, and Margarita were all in Kherson. Every minute counted.

Everyone was extremely tense. Margarita and Pasha realized that it was better for them to not work together. Vanya was drafted into the army. Pasha was given a draft summons and went to the Military Commissariat in Kyiv. Everyone left. There was no one remaining in Mykolaiv.

Our plan for a mechanized sapper was halted before we could purchase the quad bike. With the absence of work (and people) in Mykolaiv, we decided to relocate to the capital and save money for future projects. Currently, our workshop is located in Kyiv, where we contribute our engineering and technical knowledge to various volunteer projects and continue to create artworks. In a big city, everything is easier to find, buy, and, most importantly, it is easier to earn money.

We still go, at least once per season, to Mykolaiv Oblast and Kherson Oblast. We continue to provide assistance to people on a more specific basis, depending on the opportunity. We collaborate with other volunteers, field new requests, and find ways to help. We see obstacles, but we find ways to overcome them.

The road forward is different for everyone. For us, it is to provide direct help to people. But we all see the same picture when we partake in this complex, agonizing, and generally terrifying experience of wartime.