The art of misunderstanding

In entrance of me sat a grey-haired female with a silent, marginally hesitant voice. She experienced contacted me as a result of mutual friends in Tbilisi, where by she had lately organized a project. Her foundation had labored for a long time in the South Caucasus and ‘other conflict regions’, encouraging ‘mutual comprehending by way of art’. It now preferred to expand to Ukraine, ‘due to the present-day conflict’.

It was 2017. I had a short while ago moved to Switzerland just after 20 decades of cultural practice in Ukraine. Probably this was my probability to do significant and practical do the job with a basis that had been set up by a Swiss diplomat recognised, in certain, for owning participated in negotiating the Minsk agreements.

The girl, let’s simply call her Dina, was a lecturer at the Zurich College of the Arts. She desired, rather rationally, to start off with investigate: to check out places ‘in or near to the conflict zone’, discuss to the locals, hear their demands. Over-all, the plan was previously obvious: there would be a couple of learn lessons by Swiss musicians, dancers and performers, some function would be done in faculties or with younger artists, some support would be specified to refugees, and some artwork exchanges may acquire spot.

In short, the arts would be put to the assistance of peace-producing and dialogue. This is how the foundation experienced worked for 5 a long time in Abkhazia, an unrecognized crack-away region of Georgia, as properly as in the border areas of Ga and neighboring Armenia. Dina was in particular happy of the assignments in Abkhazia: the region is incredibly lousy and even crossing the seriously guarded border was practically extremely hard.

I experimented with to clarify to her that Ukraine is very little like Abkhazia. There is no ‘conflict’: there is a Russian-instigated war of profession that experienced by now been raging for a few yrs. I could hardly consider I experienced to describe all this to a human being who should have recognised what was happening in Ukraine and in the South Caucasus very first-hand. ‘You are unable to picture how rich and vivid cultural everyday living is in the south-east of Ukraine, even close to the ‘conflict line’,’ I reported ‘how a lot has occurred considering that 2014, how several initiatives and men and women hook up this area with other areas of the region. We will have to listen to neighborhood cultural activists quite diligently if we want to do some thing that will basically make perception.’ Dina appeared at me with a mixture of sadness and sympathy.

That autumn, she and I traveled to Severodonetsk, Sloviansk, Kramatorsk, Dobropillia, Bakhmut and Mariupol. In Kyiv we achieved with quite a few cultural activists, some of whom experienced been compelled to flee japanese Ukraine. Some others were centered in the money but ended up performing with associates in the east. A few months afterwards, Dina organized a funding application to the Swiss Agency for Enhancement and Cooperation for a job that, in addition to workshops for schoolchildren from the ‘grey zone’ along the conflict line, focused on handicraft workshops for ladies from the regions controlled – and not controlled – by the Ukrainian authorities. More than a interval of 8 months, ladies from the two sides of the military services border that divided the Donetsk area would fulfill in Mariupol, weave or embroider one thing less than the advice of Swiss artists, and converse about peace.

The task was rejected, largely due to the fact of concerns for the security of the men and women included. Dina returned to creating dialogue in the South Caucasus, compensated for by the Swiss govt and numerous philanthropists. I was still left with recollections of unbelievable men and women and cities, the true value of which I recognized only this yr, right after some of them almost disappeared.

Table of Contents

Compulsive reconciliation

A dove. Impression by Vladimir Agafonkin via Flickr

Most Ukrainian cultural activists have confronted identical attitudes from their western European colleagues at minimum once considering the fact that 2014: a drive for reconciliation jointly with a patronizing mind-set to Ukrainian positions. As unpleasant as it was right before, it is now simply unbearable.

Invites to participate in panel conversations, to show up at workshops or post artworks to joint exhibitions, to publish texts in a collection, to take component in a film festival are frequent occurrences — a frantic wave of well-intentioned invites with no stop in sight. Most of these gestures of goodwill are invitations to enter dialogue with Russian cultural actors. Commonly they are not motivated by solidarity and empathy, but the belief that it is inside the cultural discipline that dialogue and reconciliation involving the aggressor culture and the culture underneath attack should just take spot. Only sometimes do these situations include folks from countries and contexts with similar ordeals of prolonged aggression, resistance, and struggle for id: from Palestine, Syria, Afghanistan, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo and in other places. All through the initially nine months of the war, just a person panel I spoke on integrated a person from another conflict zone: a curator from Bosnia. It was a especially heat and essential conversation.

Considering the fact that the beginning of the comprehensive-fledged aggression that broke out on 24 February 2022, the Ukrainian cultural community has been actively looking for a solution to the trouble of ‘compulsive reconciliation’, making an attempt to tread the fine and at times risky line concerning preserving one’s dignity and the need to have to retain the desire and focus of western cultural institutions, media and platforms in which 1 can communicate about the war in Ukraine. I doubt a standard resolution exists: each individual situation is unique and should be dealt with separately.

Nonetheless, there are a number of approaches that seem to be really essential when talking about the arts and reconciliation. A single of them is to borrow from feminist rhetoric phrases like ‘no means no’, ‘my physique (region) my choice’ and ‘nothing about us devoid of us’. In seeking to defend not their posture but the correct to have a position, Ukrainian cultural activists are turning to the resources of an emancipatory discourse that troubles the patriarchal ability analyzing whose voices are important and whose are not who has the correct to determine what takes place to their bodies and who does not.

By making use of a feminist vocabulary created to defend woman subjectivity and the company of the feminine physique, Ukrainian cultural activists express the collective corporeality of war: its terrifying physical existence, its menace to every single and just about every individual, and the perception of neighborhood as a solitary organism, when the demise or injury of even comprehensive strangers echoes with rigorous ache.

When it arrives to the situations for ending the war, for demilitarization or comprehending violence, the international feminist group is significantly from unanimous in its assist of Ukrainian women’s voices and positions. Nonetheless this emancipatory rhetoric has confirmed rather effective in the worldwide inventive ecosystem, which is typically sensitive to injustice, de-subjectivation and segregation.

But maybe the most important aspect of this defence of Ukrainian subjectivity is that it is directed not at the aggressor, but a ‘third party’ – a worried observer who has taken on the mantle of ‘arbitrator’, a part that has often been theirs to think.

The war in Ukraine is exposing the epistemological power of the international West (or North). This is the ability to title and legitimize, to maintain up a ‘gold standard’ of democracy, of social and political institutions, of histories and even traumas. It is the ability to examine the growth of other societies not on their individual conditions, but towards a common measure. It is the electric power to instrumentalize the cultural fields and the arts, a power so firmly set up that makes an attempt at reflection and resistance turn out to be almost unachievable.

But there is a different helpful, though considerably much less frequent technique that Ukrainian cultural activists have employed in their creative will work and in general public conversations. It entails coming into the pacifist discourse but, as a substitute of accepting pressured dialogue or compulsive reconciliation, selecting disagreement voicing one’s have posture without the need of anxiety of criticism or conflict. This is not just a radical assertion of one’s agency which defies the evaluator and their judgments. It is also the commence of a considerably-needed discussion about the resources of the belief in art as the territory of reconciliation and the energy devices that hold this belief in area.

The instrumentalization of lifestyle

Like other former Next Globe international locations, Ukraine was the beneficiary of a western cultural coverage by now used to the 3rd Planet because the 1960s. Possessing shed much of its grip more than its former colonies, the world wide West returned in the variety of international enhancement businesses, of which European cultural institutions frequently fashioned a section. International businesses and mining providers were being also a portion of these aid offers. Economic help to younger democracies was motivated by a mixture of guilt, countrywide security considerations, and the advertising of small business pursuits.

Enhancement logic gave again electric power to the ‘white man’, this time in the nobler garb of helper and mentor who by yourself possessed know-how of the architecture of modern society, governance and the economic system. The progress logic was ruthlessly sensible, stipulating that all societal capabilities should be successful, matter to evaluation and evaluation. Lifestyle was no exception.

Below the steerage and financial support of the West, society shed its indicating and autonomy, its ability to be a procedure of relations in which liberation, recognition and subjectivity can mature. It was losing its utopian, visionary likely, starting to be disconnected with the society to which it belonged, as perfectly as its desires, traditions and troubles. The key function of culture, from Zimbabwe to Senegal, from Nigeria to Colombia, became to reduce inequality, ease poverty and, over all, advertise social cohesion and reconciliation.

Reconciliation ranged from conflicts in between indigenous peoples and the descendants of colonizers between former masters and servants amongst various ethnic teams and communities (and their cultures) which ‘historically’ (a euphemism for ‘the decision of the former metropole’) observed on their own in the identical country concerning victims of genocides and the perpetrators and their descendants in between those who protested from corrupt or prison nearby authorities and their authentic and unwavering representatives.

Many western (or northern) cultural peacemakers frequented (and still do) the World wide South with workshops and lectures, masterclasses, and summer season colleges. They taught small children and older people, amateurs, and gurus how to discover common ground and interior peace by means of the arts. They structured joint choirs and even orchestras, advised museums, libraries and universities. They had been not necessarily detached from fact, although in some cases it was not very clear what the truth was. For a long time, even regional cultural and social activists experienced been wondering in phrases of ‘underdeveloped democracies’ that ended up primarily corrupt and in need to have of ‘inequality reduction’ and ‘conflict prevention’, unconsciously borrowing from a vocabulary imposed from above.

Show on Euromaidan Protests, Regional Record Museum, Zaporozhye, Ukraine. Graphic by way of Wikimedia Commons

In the 1990s, this wave of help arrived at japanese Europe and the previous Soviet Union. Another batch of young democracies desired mentoring, particularly right after the Yugoslav Wars. Whilst lifestyle only came into concentration afterwards through the 2000s, it was nonetheless approached as an instrument of belated training or enlightenment, as a way to sew collectively the tattered social cloth of specific societies, if not whole areas. Immediately after the Maidan Revolution and Russian occupation of Crimea and parts of japanese Ukraine in 2014, calls for reconciliation and mutual knowledge grew exponentially.

I am not declaring that it is the sorts and strategies of assist that represent the problem. Alternatively, it is the epistemological method on which this assistance is based. The ‘development logic’ behind the instrumentalization of tradition assumes that the improvement of societies is a standardized linear system. It stipulates that the world is divided into the completely formulated societies of the World-wide North and individuals that are somewhere en route. Development epistemology is based mostly on sorts of awareness and social interaction inherent to these ‘successfully developed’ societies.

This technique of expertise and its carriers – all those who make vital selections and all those who watch the procedures of their execution – are a priori exterior to any growth procedures in the societies of the former third and second worlds. In this method, there is no area for ethnic conflicts, nationalisms, memory wars or authentic wars for annexations, revolutions, coups d’état, identity conflicts (or identities in basic) or lifestyle wars. Any conflict is a glitch that requires to be repaired, reconciled, dialogued. And this is the place culture and the arts appear in useful.

Decolonizing society

In his lecture ‘Planetary consciousness and the feasible potential of culture’, Achille Mbembe talks about the unique programs of knowledge and contexts in which culture exists outside the house the standardized utilitarian framework. Freed from its externally imposed performance, lifestyle gives ‘vital electricity for many kinds of producing, constituting archives, accomplishing identification, wondering, remembering’.

Society that resonates with its have modern society, that is in tune with it, chooses types of remembering, living through trauma, expression of identities and social interaction that are needed and within get to at any provided second. It can pick out reconciliation or dialogue, but it ought to be the preference of its constituents. It can decide on and use dialogue not for reconciliation, but as a sort of cognizance, discovering, and exposing ignorance, misunderstandings, or conflicts. This was at the main of the intensive method of cultural exchange in and with jap Ukraine following 2014.

What Ukrainian cultural actors begun in 2014 was a process of cultural emancipation as a way of comprehending the fact right here and now a aspiration of distinct achievable futures. It was a approach of decolonization of awareness and illustration. It was the articulation of the maxim ‘nothing about us without us’ in the language of culture.

Immediately after the beginning of the comprehensive-scale invasion, Ukrainian art assumed the purpose of radical decolonizer of lifestyle in basic. By resisting imposed pacification and forced reconciliation, Ukrainian artists are reclaiming the electrical power of arts to bear witness, to protect actuality, to be present. For over 9 months, they have been indicating that art is not about being familiar with, and definitely not being familiar with among the aggressor and those people who are defend their appropriate to existence and existence.

Responding to the open letter of Russian artist Dmitry Vilensky, Ukrainian artist Nikita Kadan wrote:

I have no use for text that do not help save lives. For now, I choose to stick with my own experience, with accumulating information about the crimes that are becoming committed before my extremely eyes. My views are not with recovering ‘the territory of dialogue’ my views are with recovering the occupied territory.