October 2013. The Bench.
The benches on Katerynoslavskyi Boulevard are gray and cold. We sit on this granite, not particularly afraid of catching a cold, laughing a lot and discussing plans for the future. It is October 2013: one month before the beginning of Euromaidan in Kyiv, which would quickly spread to Dnipro and the rest of Ukraine. It is also the beginning of Kultura Medialna.
There are three of us here: Andrii, Katia, and Lera.1 We are fidgeting on these stupid cold benches, hatching plans to organize a festival, which could be a reason for us to stay in Dnipro—an industrial city of a million people that was once called the space capital of Ukraine, but is now often considered to be the hearth (or “forge,” kuznya) from which Ukrainian capitalism sprang.2 As a city, it has the longest embankment in Europe and the shortest subway, which has never been completed. We often say that it is a city of great ambitions and dreams that never come true.
We were all born here in Dnipro and tried to leave, to give up everything, to forget, to start over where the soil is more favorable for sprouting something new. It feels almost like the land itself pushes you away. Historically, this area was called the “Loca Deserta,” or “Wild Field.” Maybe not for nothing.
We are debating what name to choose for our festival. After much deliberation, we settle on Konstruktsiya (“Construction”), in reference to the “secret” Pivdenmash Construction Bureau. Dnipro was a “closed” city for almost forty years, as from 1959–1987 it was one of the main centers in the Soviet Union for the design, production, and testing of strategic rocket and space systems. This “closedness” influenced the development of the city, its values, and the almost complete absence of dissident culture (with a few exceptions). We have always been interested in this history and in working through the side-effects, inheritances, and afterlives of Dnipro’s “closedness.”
Over the years, Construction will become a kind of anchor for us, forcing us all to stay put in Dnipro. How could we leave when we had already done so much? Construction explores the local, interacts with the spaces and people that exist here, and tests our strength and readiness to accept new things.
Over the first decade of the festival we do a lot. We hold raves in abandoned buildings. We organize exhibitions. We turn the idea of a cultural program upside down and create a space of gathering for an audience.
June 2017–June 2018. The Stage and the Palace.
In 2017, desperate to establish a permanent center for contemporary culture, we create a temporary cultural space as part of that year’s festival: a wooden stage in an abandoned part of Shevchenko Park. The municipality and regional authorities generally distrust us, so they only give us planning permission for a temporary art installation. One weekend, when a lot of people are working to finish the structure, the director of the park arrives with guards to intimidate us. But a critical mass gather to defend our rights, and the city simply has no choice but to accept our community. They are a bit shocked, but after that start to work with us.3 Alongside this, we hold part of that year’s festival in the dilapidated, almost abandoned Ilyich Palace of Culture—a vast, constructivist edifice in the north of Dnipro that no one else has dared to approach before. Both of these actions re-define our position within the city.
Still, we are always on the lookout for a space we can turn into a permanent home. The Construction Festival is held every year at different locations around the city, which helps us see the instability of its cultural infrastructure. We dream about occupying places like the Nautilus (or Mayak), an abandoned modernist restaurant on the Dnipro River; an abandoned textile factory from the early twentieth century; or a wing of the pre-constructivist Philharmonic building, part of which is still abandoned today. Negotiations around all of these places fall through. Finally, we approach the owners of a dilapidated nineteenth century palace, the ex-residence of the Russian Imperial Governor of Katerynoslav (the pre-revolutionary name of the city and region). The building had served as the headquarters of the General Staff of the Soviet Army for the Dnipropetrovsk region (the Soviet name of the area, which was in use until 2016) throughout most of the Soviet period. We are told that the costs of renovation will be covered by the owners. We will have to organize everything, and we will not receive any support for our program, which we will have to fundraise for ourselves. In the end, we get a fancy new palace to call our home and retain full control over our program. But will we still be a “grassroots” organization, one with dynamism and energy? “All we had was recklessness and courage,” some of us would later remember about this moment.
January 2022. Limbo.
The air is electrified and strange. We want to breathe but it burns our lungs. We’re all a bit anxious and sleeping poorly. There is less and less good news. But we are trying to pretend that everything is normal.
By this time, we have finally managed to bring the Dnipro Center for Contemporary Culture (DCCC) into being. Despite the fact that the renovation is still not complete, we are already moved in and have held two editions of the festival here. The first, in 2019, was when the building still had no windows and no restrooms. By the second, in 2021, we had marble windowsills, and had restored two giant structural statues of Atlas, which had previously been painted over. Every day in the office we talk about the war and the possibility of its expansion. Almost every morning begins with one of us saying: “So, what do you think, is there going to be a big war?” Dnipro is only 250 kilometers to Donetsk, about a four-hour drive.
At the same time, we are planning a course for writers and journalists in the spring, and the Promin Electronic Music Festival for April. We dream of sitting in the public square next door, which is under construction, of drinking coffee and watching crowds stream into the center. We wish the future would come sooner. Spring has never felt so welcome. We are sure that, as soon as it comes, all of our problems will suddenly disappear.
February 2022.
Our days are spent reading the news and anxiously waiting for the worst to happen. We can’t do anything. We are stuck. Screen time has expanded to about ten hours a day.
“Listen,” I say. “There is a flight from Zaporizhzhia to Istanbul tomorrow, if you are really worried.” But we are afraid to go, because it would confirm that all of this is really happening. It almost feels as if we were all in the same dream, and all we have to do is convince ourselves that we are asleep, and force our bodies to wake up. But it doesn’t work. It’s not a dream.
No one knows how to act. Everyone is asking us: “where are you?” “What are you going to do?” “What’s the plan?”
“Write down how you are and where you are. The main thing is not to panic, follow the news.”
“I’m going to my parents’ apartment, as if everything is normal.”
“I’m with my family in the country.”
“I’m standing in line at an ATM.”
“I’m with my parents. I woke up to the explosions at Pivdenmash.”
We are trying to keep ourselves busy, chatting about DCCC, sending each other news items about the preparation of bomb shelters and how locals have set fire to two Russian tanks in Kharkiv. We don’t know what to do or where to run. We huddle together to keep from going crazy. Our eyes hurt from reading the news, and we don’t sleep for fear of missing something important. The story unfolds in real time: is Kyiv still standing? Have they reached Zaporizhzhia? Our previous life has already been lost. It simply ceased to exist. The map of Ukraine is painted red on three sides. Every time we look out we imagine we might see a Russian tank on the street.
March 2022. Evacuation.
In the morning, we decide to leave within two hours. We just have to wait it out in a safer place. Our destination is Uzhhorod, in the far west of Ukraine, right next to the Hungarian border. The road to get there runs straight through the whole country. Normally, it would take twenty hours to get there by car. This time, we have been traveling for four days. We have never seen such busy roads. We get a flat tire in a field near Oleksandriya; we spend the night in an oncology hospital, in a hotel, with friends, in a strange, rented apartment with zebra-colored wallpaper. We meet wonderful people along the way, like the men standing at a checkpoint somewhere near Kropyvnytskyi who give us a bag of red apples.
It is Katya’s birthday. We are “celebrating” in a small coffee shop near the house we’ve been staying in. It’s certainly not home; it’s too far away. Home is on the steppe, on the banks of the river, only two hundred kilometers from the front line. There will never be another home. A heart-shaped candle sticks out of a piece of cake. Katya blows it out, closing her eyes. Her wish is unspoken, but we all know what it is.
April 2022. The Unknown.
Most of the team has left. There are only a few of us left in this huge building. It feels empty, it’s a little scary. We hardly communicate with each other. We are separated by two walls and a corridor, locked in different rooms as if they’re fortresses. We need to move on and be useful. We open a temporary social hub at DCCC and start organizing small events: workshops, classes for children, and screenings of Ukrainian films. Together with our friend Zhenia Ice, we decide to try to assemble an audience for a small fundraising concert. We aren’t sure if it’s possible to gather people in one place, or if it is even worth the effort, but we decide to try. Local sound artists play, and about fifty people gather. We receive very powerful feedback from the people who come. Everyone is grateful for the opportunity to get together, to leave the house even in fear, and to start communicating again. We start to organize these events on a regular basis because they work as a sort of therapy, and at the same time they help raise money for the needs of our friends in the military.
We invite several humanitarian organizations that help internally displaced people, and we invite an organization from the Donetsk region to move into our space. We are definitely still volunteers. The war, if nothing else, suspends the process of our “palatalization.” At least we are not lonely anymore. We run around trying to arrange things. Everything just goes on by itself. We don’t think about the future; we are only here, now. In general, we think less about everything that is happening. There will be time for that later. Now is the time for action. We do whatever comes to mind and seems appropriate. A small lump of life beats inside like a squirming lizard. No one knows if there will be a tomorrow, if the next siren will be the harbinger of the end for any of us.
Autumn 2022. The Return.
People are gradually returning. There are more of us, which is good news. The social hub at DCCC has grown, and we have managed to find funding for the next six months of programming. We write podcasts, show movies, host community meals, movie screenings, a Ukrainian-language conversation club (for displaced families from the east who want to improve their proficiency), discussions, and much more. We reorient our program away from an elite or “cutting-edge” understanding of “contemporary culture” and towards the immediate needs of the thousands of displaced people who have made their way to Dnipro from the frontlines.
In the spring of 2023, we bring the exhibition Let the long. Road. Lead. To. Stairs in. The Heavens to Dnipro, organized with the Czech gallery PLATO Ostrava.4 It is our first exhibition since the beginning of the full-scale invasion and one of the first attempts by curators and artists to articulate their different experiences and define ourselves in the present. Since then, there have been several more exhibitions. In November 2023, we hold the exhibition Nevertheless, devoted to artistic practices that are guided by and integrated with volunteering, activism, and reconstruction initiatives, which was connected to that year’s edition of the Construction Festival.5 In November 2024, we open an exhibition Who Else Holds That Field Dear?, which focuses on food sovereignty and food security, and includes artists from Ukraine as well as from Middle Eastern and Central Asian countries.6
Now more than ever, we feel that we are ready to share our experiences and learn from others who have also lost their lands, lives, and resources due to long histories of military action, coercive resource extraction, and other forms of violent coloniality. We are constantly talking about resilience. About staying here to prevent what we have built from crumbling. Because this is our land, our city, no matter how much we sometimes resent it. It is important for us to be here, to work with local communities, to support those who want to change something. We are less than 150 kilometers from the eastern frontline and 100 kilometers from the southern frontline. Sometimes we forget about the conditions in which we work. We hear sirens ten times every day, some days more. We have gotten used to their sound, which was so frightening in the first days.
As part of the 2021 Construction Festival, Ukrainian artist Sasha Kurmaz presented a work called Symphony of Anxiety, where he used the sounds of different sirens—a police car, a fire truck, an ambulance—to create an eerie soundscape. To prepare the work, he asked us to record the sound of the air raid siren, which used to be tested once a year in case there was some kind of emergency. Now, this siren almost never shuts up, and there are hundreds, thousands of them. The state of emergency and the ensuing symphony of anxiety are played daily. It was hard to listen to Kurmaz’s work back then, some people even covered their ears. But now, part of this work is constantly playing in our heads and on the streets.
May-November 2024. The Cinema.
Today, our venue manager Hanna is going to Donetsk to pick up blue velvet chairs from a cinema in Kostiantynivka that opened just before the full-scale invasion. The frontline is moving very fast, now less than ten kilometers away from town. The military helped us bring the chairs to Dnipro. The frontline is also moving in our direction, from different sides. But we live here, and we are opening a cinema.
It never stops feeling strange that, during war, certain everyday activities remain possible. Every time we go to a bar at the end of a working week, or go to a movie, or to a café, someone says that they never would have thought such a way of life would be possible during war. But in the end, we are just lucky. We are not as close to Russia as Kherson or Mariupol.
We laugh all the time, as if we are trying to drown out the sounds of sirens and the reality we have to live through. Humor makes our injuries less painful, as if it washes the wounds and makes them heal faster. Our whole existence is full of contradictions, and laughing through tears is only a small part of them. To joke while the world burns, to hold onto ourselves and not let others fall into the abyss… We do it the only way we know how—through culture.
The future is fuzzy and blurry. Water is flooding everything around us. At first, we tried to wait out the rain. It seemed like it would be over any minute, but it kept pouring down. Then we realized that we had to learn to live in these conditions, to maintain a fragile hope that the downpour will eventually stop. None of us know whether it will actually end, but it is all that remains.
Lera Malchenko was a co-founder of the Construction Festival, but has since left the team.
Many of Ukraine’s most powerful capitalists and politicians hail from Dnipro for this reason. On this subject, see Yuliya Yurchenko, Ukraine and the Empire of Capital: From Marketisation to Armed Conflict (Pluto Press, 2018).
Together, we have since installed electricity in this abandoned part of the park, cut down all the dangerous trees, and cleaned up the area. We dismantled the stage after two years of use, but the space is still actively used by the public even now, and public services clean and maintain it.
The exhibition was curated by Milena Khomchenko, Yulia Krivich, and Clemens Poole.
Curated by Clemens Poole and Kateryna Rusetska, the festival was devoted to reconstruction initiatives and held under the title Ukrainian Hardcore; the accompanying discussion programme, “Radical Reconstruction: Re-Rooting the Ukrainian Commons” was curated by Michał Murawski and Kateryna Rusetska.
Curated by Diana Khalilova, Kateryna Rusetska, Cicely Farrer, and Laura Mansfield.
Reconstruction is a project by e-flux Architecture drawing from and elaborating on Ukrainian Hardcore: Learning from the Grassroots, the eighth annual Construction festival held in the Dnipro Center for Contemporary Culture on November 10–12, 2023 (2024), and “The Reconstruction of Ukraine: Ruination, Representation, Solidarity,” a symposium held on September 9–11, 2022 organized by Sofia Dyak, Marta Kuzma, and Michał Murawski, which brought together the Center for Urban History, Lviv; Center for Urban Studies, Kyiv; Kyiv National University of Construction and Architecture; Re-Start Ukraine; University College London; Urban Forms Center, Kharkiv; Yale University; and Visual Culture Research Center, Kyiv (2023).
