I presented this paper on October 24, 2025, at the online VIII international Interdisciplinary Scientific and Practical Conference titled GENDER ECOLOGY HEALTH organized by the National Medical University of Kharkiv, find abstract in the conference proceedings at this link https://repo.knmu.edu.ua/items/2560758f-4731-46d1-b902-9e3b1e7dc85
Greatly indebted to Prof. Kateryna Karpenko for the invitation.
Women’s Imagination against Ecocide: The Indestructible Porcelain of Poetry and Image in the Work of Contemporary Ukrainian Poets and Filmmakers
by Pina Piccolo, writer and independent scholar
The Russian Federation’s attempts to subjugate Ukraine militarily, politically and culturally, starting in 2014 and going full-scale since 24 February 2022, have given rise to innumerable practices of resistance on the battle fields, in the political arena, in the daily life of its inhabitants, and in cultural and artistic circles. Imagination is certainly employed in all those practices, along with other elements, in specific proportion to the needs of each context. How imagination impacts these practices has reverberations that go beyond Russia and Ukraine and constitutes an ongoing challenge and inspiration to citizens, politicians, artists all over the world. The depth and breadth of these efforts are testified by the range of topics in this conference; besides conceptualizing the pertinent topics, attention is paid to the practical devising of measures to counteract the trauma and rebuild torn communities and society on a new basis in the midst and after the war.
Based on my experience participating in international cultural activism in solidarity with Ukraine and promoting its writers and artists, both in the US and Italy, I would like to focus on the contributions of women poets and documentary filmmakers, explore the variety of approaches prompted by their gendered experience, as well as the multitude of ways nature and the environment are integrated in artistic products, not as backdrop elements but as foreground, in continuity with the life and experience of sentient and non-sentient beings. Related to concepts of gender, the environment and ecocide, which are a focus of this conference, in my talk I will try to touch on the ways transnational collaborations between Ukrainian artists and others internationally have yielded high quality artistic products that have won acclaim and sparked debate, including the two documentaries, Porcelain War and Kherson: Human Safari as well as the poetic production and critical work of three poets I have been studying and promoting; i.e., Iya Kiva, Iryna Shuvalova, and Mariya Grabovska.
***
What brings together porcelain, women, poetry and the imagination as the title of this paper suggests? The inspiration came from a documentary that I saw at a film festival in Sebastopol (California, not Russia) six months ago, Porcelain War[1]. According to the Ukrainian porcelain maker Slava Leontyev and painter, decorator Anya Stasenko, his wife, whose work is featured in the documentary, the analogy is with the resistance of the Ukrainian people against the invasion and occupation by the Russian Federation: it appears to be fragile because of the asymmetry in power yet it is indestructible like porcelain, a material that has survived since antiquity in spite of being buried and maltreated. I have added poetry, women and imagination to the equation because I see them as strengthening factors, a kind of additive and glue that ensures its long-term survival. As a material to be used for artistic purposes, porcelain is part of the environment, and both in a natural and social sense the key elements of artistic production are space and time (the chronotope[2], if we wish to frame it in Bakhtinian terms). For Bakhtin, in literature, any type of meaning, in order to be conveyed and received, must take on the form of a sign, or temporal-spatial expression that is audible and visible to us. Thus, if we wish to understand both the relation of humans to the environment and in the case of Ukraine today, the ongoing ecocide, as well as possible practices of the imagination that fuel resistance, we might want to take those two elements, time and space, as points of departure.
In what may seem like a strange turn to take, I would like to start by mentioning a short story by this year’s Nobel prize winner for Literature Lazlo Kraznahorkai, titled “An Angel Passed Above Us”[3]. The short story is accompanied by an extensive interview with the author. The protagonists are two unnamed, seriously wounded and maimed Ukrainian soldiers, hiding in a trench awaiting to be rescued by medics. One, who has only one arm and one leg, drags what remains of his body to check on the other, a mortally wounded companion whose head keeps slipping off his neck. The first soldier releases a torrent of words to keep the other from falling asleep. It is an unstoppable, unpunctuated flow of verbiage, typical of Kraznahorkai’s prose, that could be constructed as fairy tale about the present from the point of view of a futurologist. Thus, he spins a rosy picture of the wonders of globalization and technology, communication, acceleration, the virtual world, bitcoins and NFTs, the amazing future that lays in store if only this one last hurdle of being rescued can be overcome. The story is deployed out of love, the spinning of the tale of hope is intended to gain time until the arrival of medics who can actually save them. Thus indirectly, the author introduces the topic of facts vs fiction, action vs narrative, something in dire need of being considered these days, especially as hybrid wars prevail.
The space of the short story is a claustrophobic ditch, where the only, constant buzzing sound is that of sheehad drones, shelling and explosions, an occasional bird to signal that natural life still persists. The mortally wounded soldier whose head keeps slipping off his neck, reacts with just a few words, initially collaborative and hopeful, “yeah, exciting” and then increasingly curt, frustrated, impatient for the lack of water and the delayed arrival of help, ultimately realistic “We are going to croak” until there is no response. Though to a rational mind waiting and time have come to an end, with the end of the story, the parting words of the chatty futurologist are hopeful and loving as he challenges the finality of it all:
“because a utopia means a certain direction that seems impossible, and a million utopias might fail to materialize, but the one millionth and first will succeed, it’s cathedral building, yes, and he very much hoped that what he was saying was powerful enough to keep his companion from falling asleep, wake up, soldier, I hear a T-64, they’re coming for us, and if I can endure, so can you, just hear the last thing I have to say—you must never give up, because life will be amazing, give me just one little blink, please give me just one blink.
That you hear me.” (Kraznahorkai, 2025)
This tableau, emblematic of despair, care taking and love in 2025, written by a Hungarian against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine from a nation like Hungary, which has also known Russian colonialism and is currently in the throes of a tyrannical government, brought to my mind another archetypal piece of literature, written by yet another Nobel prize winner, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot[4], a piece written originally in French by an Irishman, inspired by his own autobiography, as he was later to admit, his own experiences of time and place as he and his partner were fleeing for their survival through the Germany occupied French countryside, fearing arrest for their activities in the French Resistance. The clipped exchanges between the two ‘tramps’ Vladimir and Estragon, (punctuated by the appearance of Pozzo and the dog) are set, by contrast, in a vast, empty expanse, at the center of which stands a single tree, the passing of the season signaled by the dropping of leaves or the blooming of flowers. In short sentences that encapsulated the themes of existentialism, alienation, the Absurd, slave and master power relations and the lack of meaning of life, the play invited reflection by subtraction, rather than addition, as a method of survival, unlike the short story written 75 years later by Kraznahorkay.
***
Against the backdrop of these two extreme ends of the chronotope, detailing a tale of mid twenty century and one on the first quarter of the twenty-first, both written by men, I would like to consider the work of poet and essayist Iya Kiva, who in her essay “In Wartime, Everything Is a Verb”[5] writes:
“As a writer, I consider the main task of poetry to be the hearing and feeling of time, and the attempt to find appropriate words for it. Because each time has its own vocabulary, its own language, its own intonations. But what is it— this time in which I live?”
After making a case for Ukrainian time having been stolen by history “Repressed history and private memory,
“the stolen 20th century” (that’s how Ukrainians talk about their lost chance to gain their own statehood, 100 years ago), murdered Ukrainian culture, Holodomor, the Holocaust, war, deportations, another war, war again. While our closest neighbors are discussing waste sorting or the challenges of the climate crisis, Ukrainians are trying to tell their own story in their own words, from the point of view of a Ukrainian subjectivity and agency”. (Kiva, 2025)
Kiva remarks that for the first time, she lives in the present tense. In her bilingual Ukrainian Italian poetry collection La guerra è sempre seduta su tutte le sedie / війна завжди сидить відразу на всіх стільцях[6] (War Is Always Sitting on Every Chair) in her selection of 30 poems, some written as far back as 2014, most of them written since the launch of the full-scale invasion, Iya Kiva provides a gamut of metaphors to convey the experience of place and time during war. Spatial references vary greatly, from physical sites frequented by the internally displaced such as the floor of a Lviv theater, cleared to accommodate refugees (Kiva, 2024, p. 55), to train stations where people who are about to assume refugee status are crowded on the platforms (Kiva, 2024 p. 51), to the paper space of war trauma appearing in intergenerational family photographs “Where war is always sitting on every chair” (Kiva, 2024 p. 51), to creeks where children swim back and forth between the banks just to avoid going crazy (Kiva, 2024, p. 35). Akin to the incertitude of clear boundaries in the physical space, there is then the instability of psychological space, as remarked by Yuliya Chernyshova in her Afterword (Kiva, 2024 pp. 113-7), which too is unstable, wavering, wobbly, dominated by psychological states in which it is impossible to even identify one’s feelings, as loss permeates everything creating an irrational borderline, where poetry is needed to set the viscous texture of experience (Kiva, 2024, pp. 113-5). She also depicts the space of memory, for example the little hills made of residue from coal mines that populated the terrain of fear in her childhood (Kiva, 2024, p. 43). As for time, there is the time of human lives, whose past, present and future seems to be driven by never ending wars as well as the cyclical time, oftentimes associated with nature. Though sometimes nature too is forced into the bleak anthropomorphic poses dictated by war, with the trees raising their branches to signal surrender (Kiva, 2024, p. 27) it is its cyclical character that prevails, with images of trees and blooming flowers, vines taking over the forest and homes, in spite of the destruction and poisoning of war, nature is seen as a regenerative force, oftentimes rhizomatic and capable of engulfing the human, plants, animals, rock in a salvific, entangled web of being.
This present tense though seems very different from the suspended time, empty of words though filled expectations experienced by Gogo and Didi in Beckett’s play, or conversely the present filled with uninterrupted flow of words referring to the accelerating vortex of technology and globalization in the ditch evoked by Kraznahorkai’s short story. On one hand, war stops time firmly setting in a series of todays, detached from past and future:
“Living in Ukraine today, you cannot plan any further in advance than one day. No Ukrainian, falling asleep at night can be sure that he will wake up in the morning”. And what seemed to be a time that had managed to emancipate itself is actually hostage to a sniper from the past, as Russia ‘s war against Ukraine is a war for the past- to make the past great again.” (Kiva, 2025)
Thus, Iya Kiva is striving to conceptualize a practical and philosophical framework to evaluate how time has changed during this latest war for the population of Ukraine, communities that experience war both as individuals and as a larger part of a historical process over which they as individuals have little control, except for modulating the quality of their daily action.
“All that a person in the vortex of war can do is acknowledge the extent of their own will and take on the responsibility of lessening the chaos of the unknown with each choice they make, to give the next plot turn a chance to turn toward good – at least a bit. At least a chance.” (Kiva, 2025)
However, the realization that there is no control over the future has as its consequence that it feels like the future is bearing down on you
“[…]The logic of war, by robbing us of the illusion of mastery over time, robs us above all of ease. Of that ease that’s characteristic of peacetime, when there’s so much that’s not required of you, so much joy from slowness, sweetness from doing nothing. In wartime, a person is a verb. In wartime, everything’s a verb.” (Kiva, 2025)
In terms of Kraznahorkai’s tale, the existential choice of the first soldier is to speak, to resist the tyranny of the cruelty of war and the limitations of the wounded body (both his own and his companion) by lengthening life during the present, waiting for a future rescue. Due to the objective fact of its mortal wounds, the dying soldier acknowledges the bearing down of the future and defeat “We are going to croak” while the other one insists on trying to give the next plot turn a chance to turn toward good, in the face of the impossible ( Kraznahorkai, 2025).
Iya Kiva goes on to say:
“To re-think anything in war, one needs not only quantifiable time – or chronos – but above all qualifiable time – or kairos. Here one is reminded of Horace’s “carpe diem”: “Seize the day, trusting the future as little as possible” – as well as the biblical “So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today!” Both sayings take on a new ring in wartime”. (Kiva, 2025)
And it is in this space of a limited-action present and unknowable future that ordinary citizens as well as artists practice their options, as their own ethics dictate.
Iya Kiva closes her essay with the following observations:
“Ukrainians see the future during wartime much like a gardener who knows that they themselves are in danger, that the space into which they are putting their love, time, and effort is in danger, that the flowers and trees that they’re trying to grow in Ukrainian soil are in danger – but who still keeps digging, planting, watering, furrowing, fertilizing, mulching, and weeding. Literally and metaphorically. The New York Literary Garden of Victoria Amelina, for example, is blooming with essays by teenagers from the Donetsk region contemplating the future – Ukraine’s and their own.
As for the garden of the Ukrainian future, the gardener might not live to see what grows here. But something will always grow from love.” (Kiva, 2025)
***
This idea of time ticking and the uncertainty of the future, the future and a garden that you have planted but whose outcome you are not likely to be able to control, is very much present in Zarina Zabrisky’s 2025 documentary Kherson: Human Safari[7]. The poet and essayist Iya Kiva recognizes the significance of documentaries in Ukraine today:
“Memory, which shapes our sense of time, is suffering just as much from Russian attacks and strikes as Ukrainian territory. Individual memory, collective memory, societal memory. Memory, the critical infrastructure of the Ukrainian future, is being cracked, shattered, split, and blown to shreds by the war. This is why there is so much documentary, archival, and memorial work being done now in Ukraine. This work with memory gives the Russo-Ukrainian war structure and form, and gives the Ukrainian future space for self-preservation. Even after its formal conclusion, the war will still need to be won on the battlefield of narrative. Today’s living memory of a war that hasn’t yet become the past is like a spring that needs a well built around it.” (Kiva, 2025)
Zarina Zabrisky’s skillful and poetic camera-work guides spectators in witnessing the images of the front-line city of Kherson over the three-year span of the invasion and war, listening to the words, the silences and body language of the actual people of Kherson, not actors, their dismays and hopes, their dances and music interwoven at strategic points of the documentary, their reflections and aspirations. It lets the spectator’s eye linger on the rich texture the time-space of a front-line city of Ukraine that has undergone different stages of experience of the war from occupation, resistance, a fake referendum, liberation, man-made natural catastrophe with the flooding due to the destruction of the Kakovka dam, renewed attacks from the Russian and finally the very cruel hunt of individuals through explosive drone targeting (among many other Kherson civilians since March of this year, is the case of Larysa Vakuliuk, known as Baba Lora, an 84 year old goatherder who had been interviewed for the documentary and was blown to smithereens on October 23, 2025, along with her goat by an Iranian made shaheed piloted remotely by a Russian soldier)[8].
By focusing exclusively on the time space of a single city from the point of view of a gamut of ordinary people, it is possible to glimpse how imagination was used in everyday life, not only to materially survive but to nourish a will to live, be collaborative and maintain hope for the future. That is, to identify a range of action that will lessen “the chaos of the unknown with each choice they make, to give the next plot turn a chance to turn toward good – at least a bit. At least a chance” as Iya Kiva wrote in her essay. This documentary constitutes a significant repository of experience and memory to be put to the future uses that Iya Kiva suggested in her essay. Each piece of testimony brings to the fore a psychological dimension, a self-reflection in which dealing with trauma is not relegated to a task of the future but rather an ongoing practice requiring the use of tools that exceed the range of the automatic, of the conventions of ordinary daily life. It’s like an opening to estrangement, a first step needed in the creation of art as well.
Through the combination of different art forms (speech, music, dance – the latter we find out almost at the end of the documentary is performed by a local dentist), the spectator is put in a position to acquire a more holistic understanding of the scattered news, images and commentaries that have reached the Western world in these past three years of war, not counting the ‘silent war’ that started in 2014 with the annexation of Crimea and then the attempt to annex the Donbas region. What emerges from this documentary is the extraordinary vitality and dignity of a people who have stayed in their city and must come to terms with their life experience, losses, separation, solidarities and betrayals, and prospects for the future. They are experiencing time much in the same way that Iya Kiva laid out in her essay, and relive them, day by day as they respond to the documentarian attempt to create a chronology. Time and memory become embodied in the textiles and embroideries acting as a memory source, as one of the residents/protagonists pulls them out throughout the documentary. It is a physical testimony that not everything can be taken away, and in fact at the end of the film, as the prospects of surviving in the city seem increasingly dim, we see her almost furiously embroidering as a way to affirm herself and life.
Objects as memory and self-affirmation against the attempts at cancellation, a rebellion to loss, the urge of self-expression, in this documentary also turn into the very physical body of one of the inhabitants, Olena Yemelisntseva who dances her grief, trauma, disappointment, loss, joy, defiance and resistance, as a way of opening up each chapter with a woman’s body appropriating space and time. The dangers of tying corporeality almost stereotypically to femaleness were discussed in a double interview/conversation between poets Iryna Shuvalova and Iya Kiva[9], which starts from the use of the lyrical I in poetry, and then discusses the body as a source of all knowledge and experience and how that impacts writing. A whole section of the interview is devoted to private life and how war destroys it, bringing to mind the great work on the subject by Susan Griffin, in her seminal 1993 book A Chorus of Stones – The Private Life of War[10] which delineates the particular ways women and men’s experience differ in war contexts. The texture of the conversation between the two poets, brimming with examples from literature, history, both personal and on a worldwide scale, as well as life more generally reminded me of a quote from Griffin’s book “Perhaps every moment of time lived in human consciousness remains in the air around us” which certainly resonates with some of the poetry and imagery that the war in Ukraine is bringing to the surface. With her words, Susan Griffin begins to draw the connections between personal histories and the violent and often unspoken events of this century. In the thirty years that have elapsed since the book was published, changes in the circumstances of women and especially their direct participation in combat as is happening to a much larger degree today in the Ukrainian army where an estimated number of up 70,000 women have volunteered to be engaged in active combat, with must be taken into account but it is undoubtedly a book that has much to say to us today. Some of the scholarly Iryna Shuvalova’s scholarly work has already begun to dig deeper into the territory of gender, for example in her exploration of how war affects communities by analyzing war songs, [11] particularly her chapter analyzing veteran cum singer Stasik in the chapter “Stasik: Problematizing Representations of femininity in Wartime Ukraine through Popular Music”.[12]
Going back to the chronotope and bodies moving through space, it would be interesting to make an analogy between writing and other art forms, such as dancing, using the body as an instrument to traverse space through intentional movement, akin to traversing the page intentionally with words, in a way that strays from the ordinary use of language, a way that implies ‘otherness’ and estrangement. Asked about how the violence of war has broken down doors in her poetic language, Iryna Shuvalova replies:
“Language is inherently flexible, but like everything else, it has its limits. Imagine language as a vine that bends and bends until it eventually snaps. Since the full-scale invasion, I’ve noticed a kind of fracture in my writing, with new internal fissures appearing. This deformation is ongoing. I feel a need to write differently, but I’m still uncertain about what this new direction will look like once my current language fully breaks down and something new emerges.” (Shuvalova, 2024).
In a way the dancing segments in the documentary show the dancer’s search to articulate a whole array of feelings and psychological states, some of them so novel and disturbing as to require movements that are far from harmonious or attractive, as can be seen in the segment that underscore betrayal, rage and loss. It is the problem of finding the ways to express incertitude in any art form. An analogy can be made about what can be expressed and what cannot be expressed in poetry, Shuvalova says:
“[being a poet]” It’s about drawing closer to the boundary between what can be articulated and what cannot, what lies beyond words. In working with language, a poet can push toward this boundary, even shift it at times, but can never fully cross over. (Shuvalova 2024)
We are always stretching the limits of what can be expressed…. A thought that Iya Kiva completes with this observation: “… but the realm of the unspoken can also grow. It’s akin to maintaining a balance in a physical sense.”
As their conversation deepens, apprehending the world through the body includes acquiring its ‘elemental’ quality as well, acknowledging the boundaries it poses and imposes, not being scared when it apparently turns indomitable (which sometimes men mistake for violent). When asked whether she can feel the emergence of a poem at a physical level, Shuvalova answers in a way that is pertinent to dance:
“— Not in a specific part of my body, but the rhythm, which is important to me in poetry, is something I truly feel physically. How does this happen? I suppose I experience the poem in my body as an internal dance.[…] What I do when I read my poems is similar to this shamanic invocation. When you’re creating a poem, the text first emerges when I write it, but to make it come alive in a new context, it has to flow through me again. This process is only possible through that internal dance of creation.” (Shuvalova, 2024)
Continuing with our focus on time and space, Iryna Shuvalova’s and Iya Kiva’s conversation about corporeality, the body and acknowledging boundaries seamlessly usher us to the footage of the Russian induced flood that ensued from from the destruction of Kakhovka Dam, it reveals the apocalyptic dimension of ecocide and brings to mind many of the lines from Iryna Shuvalova’s poem “great water triptych”[13] with her biblical evocation of the ark in the form of a present day, lower case noah on an outboard motor pulling out drenched people and animals from the waters. Particularly poignant in the testimonies contained in the documentary is the feeling of guilt for not being able to help the people on the other side of the Dnipro, who were left to drown by the Russians, recognizing them not as something alien, but as a part of themselves. A mixed feeling of care, responsibility and dread that is akin to the limbless soldier in the trench evoked in Lazlo Khraznahorkai’s short story.
Earlier in the film, the features of the natural landscape, besides being a backdrop for the movement of troops, at times provided a salvific setting as Khersonians walking by the banks of the Dnipro River were reminded of daring boat rescues under the cover of night of children stolen by the Russian government with false promises of summer camps, a connection with nature in a devastated city, people insisting on preserving their natural, human status by taking walks by the river in spite of the danger of being one km away from mortars and snipers, and now of sheehad drones, a technology of death creating a novel space that bridges distance for the sake of destruction, letting the remote pilot select a human target quite far away, place it in the crosshairs and, like in a video game, command the flying machine to drop explosives at their feet to destroy them.
In the face of increased destruction and hatred, Zarina Zabrisky, has focused on the cultural resistance of ordinary people, presenting a gamut of the cultural life of the city varying from the testimony of puppet theater professionals who chose to flee rather than being forced to produce shows for the Russian invaders when they occupied the city, to amateur nights that have now moved underground, in the literal sense of the word and occupy a different kind of space. In the city with a dwindling number of inhabitants and facing increasing danger, the residents push the boundaries of their imagination and comfort zones, and see the emergence of a new sense of pride for their novel skills of expression and storytelling. In this documentary, it is the storytelling of ordinary people that is documented while in “Porcelain War” the documentarian focuses on the new ways the war has affected the growth, collaboration and skill of people who are professional artists.
Though viewers have witnessed a crescendo of horror from the description of brutal, indiscriminate killings of civilians by Russian soldiers in the initial phases of the war, to the mass incineration and mass graves reserved to dead Russian soldiers as well, after liberation the relentless shelling from the opposite bank of the river that is barely one km away from the city, the death and destruction caused by blowing up of the dam and the lethal Russian deterrence from rescuing survivors, nothing can prepare them for being the targets of human safaris that are alluded to in the title. Khersonians say: “Though we are accustomed to fearing nuclear weapons and mass death, being the selected target of Russian specialist delivering napalm and grenades specifically to you with the intention of killing or maiming you as you return from work, or step out of your car to go to the doctor, or as you are on a bike with your child, is impossible to countenance”. Nevertheless, one of the interviewees admits to instinctively want to turn that drone around to target those who are targeting her, but then thinks better of it, realizing what its consequences of that action would be and refuses to plummet so low. An appeal to stay human, maintain our conscience even in dark times. Unfortunately, the scenes shown are also a sign of a form of warfare that could be normalized in the 21st century, and unlike Zarina Zabrisky very few film makers seem to be ready to talk about it.
Going back to the theme of space and time, the concluding scene of the documentary ominously shows the inner mechanism of a clock ticking, and with that image the director is driving the point of the urgency of our acting to prevent the daily massacre of a people. What comes to mind is both the closed space and the suspended time of the trench soldiers in Kraznahorka’si short story, the tramps waiting for Godot, but in this documentary, directed by a Russian born woman who migrated as a young woman to the United States, and has engaged with the arts and journalism for long years, deciding to move to Ukraine so her work can be more effective, the documentary material is meant to inspire audiences to action, so that those efforts of the people enduring the war will not be erased by the mightier force of the opponent.
The documentary is ushered in and closes on the notes and the words of the 1930’s standard “Dream a Little Dream of Me” which may echo in our minds covered in the voices of Ella Fitzgerald, Sylvie Vartan or Eddie Vedder. It should be interpreted as an appeal from the people of Kherson urging us to dream together in a sort of entangled reality shared by way of artistic production. A call to action to bring about a world free of the nightmares they are experiencing, nightmares that could potentially expand elsewhere (as can be seen in the drone attacks in Poland) and that are conveyed so convincingly in this documentary.
***
The images of ecocide transpiring through war in Kherson: Human Safari often focus on the vegetation. The sycamore trees mentioned in the theme song are shown throughout the documentary in various conditions: early on wounded and decapitated by the irrational, blind fury and shooting of the invading army, motionless targets that cannot hide or escape. Later they are shown recovering and revived as the city has managed to shake off the invaders. In the final shot, there are many closeups of the sycamores next to rows of destroyed apartment buildings: they seem to elicit a dialogue with viewers, a plea for their continued existence as part and parcel of the chain of existence in the city. Just as the images of the floodwater taking over and in a way binding everything together, as a unified whole in which the boundaries have been effaced, they can open a tragic window on interdependencies, shifting the idea of bounded space to quite contemporary theorizations in ecological studies like that of transcorporeality, a concept coined by Stacy Alaimo[14] and whose pioneering, basic tenets challenging the mastery of humans over nature were originally proposed by scholar Val Plumwood[15]. Eschewing borders of individuality and identity, Alaimo views the human body as interconnected with the environment, challenging the idea of the body as a separate, self-contained entity. Far from being separate individualities, human bodies are in constant material exchange with the world, meaning our “substance” is made up of the environment, such as the air we breathe, the food we eat, the microbes we host, and the toxins we absorb. This concept highlights how flows of materials and energy physically link humans with other beings and ecological systems, making the human body a “mobile space” deeply entangled with the non-human world. All of this, of course, has serious repercussions on poetics, on established tropes like the lyrical I, on concepts such as privacy and identity. A time and space that provides grounds for a radically different kind of imagination.
Though in poetry the blurring of boundaries has been accomplished with different literary schools like Surrealism and poetry in its nature of estranged language leaves room for ambiguity and interpretation, there is great potential for depicting reality apprehended in this radically different way. This shift away from traditional notions of reality, tied to discoveries in physics and system theory proposes a kind of kind of entangled space that can be very productive for poetry today and has been explored by Mariya Grabovska (pseudonym for scholar Mariya Shcherbyna[16]), made even more complex by her status as a woman, artist and scholar displaced by war. In her poem “Travel Notes”[17] she posits the annulment of boundaries in a series starting inside the space of a busy metro train in Turin (a system with only one branch as compared to the three in Kyiv), where history, nature, the human, animals and mythological beings, some wearing human masks, meld together, and she ends up musing “It’s a metro line, not, branch. Where’s its growth? / What will I be when we crawl to the surface?” which could evoke either an emergence into an urban context, or a lung fish crawling to land from the sea. The more liquid milieu that could more directly be associated with a watery scene, and a kind of fluidity through space, where progress and movement are not limited by boundaries is set, in appearance trivially, in a restaurant, where the liquid contents and noodles in a bowl of soup are transfigured:
“The woman looks into the water column, as if really diving into the water.
She smells something salty, may be, wind and waves are somewhere.
Far below the waves there is darkness, where there are no rays.
Algae, glassy and transparent, float on that water.
The fish-rod shines like lamps in summer.
It shines like that woman looking into her dark blue plate.
The way she stretches her hand,
The way she starts the song.
The woman eats slowly.
And the wind comes. (Grabovska, 2023)
The space and time created by poetry keep shifting and forcing the reader out of their comfort zone, into a space contemporary and primordial at once. The same occurs for the world of plants, in this case eucalyptus, that could be kin to the sycamores appearing in the documentary.
Here the poet seems to be listening to the voice of the plant:
You say it’s completely unpleasant
To crawl through somebody’s wetlands.
Whether fish, insect, warm-blooded,
whether in metaphor or in some similar way,
Unpronounceable,
They’re not as good as the Real…
With their pain, life and their deep purpose.
The epic of a schlimazel,
No sense, no language, no meaning,
Except smells, but also to them
the interpretation is needed. (Grabovska, 2023)
And from there the space of the poem is occupied with the point of view of the plant worrying about the demands of the humans, their need for interpretation which is hard to accommodate without an organ of speech. In a way, it’s still a mimetic trick, it’s the poet putting herself in the shoes of the plant, but maybe a day in not too distant a future, we might develop means to amplify the voices of plants and animals, entering in with whatever organ of expression they have. Then we should truly have the poetry of beings that are not human. But going back to the stage in which are still using our imaginations to recreate their artistic expressions and predicaments, how akin is their condition to that of the poet, whose ordinary space has been made inhabitable and is forced into unknown environments and fates?
Mariya Shcherbyna has experienced displacement as an artist and a scholar due to war, a condition that is similar both to Iya Kiva’s and Iryna Shuvalova’s, both of whom have pondered how their lived experience of being forced to move because of war is reflected in the structure and the content of their poetry. Their experience of displacement is further characterized by the fact that they are women, thus a gender component must be added, and in the case of Iryna Shuvalova a consideration of queer identity. All three of them have engaged with the subject of gender in their critical work, and a comparison of their views would yield fruitful terrain for research by scholars. Their flexibility, and commitment to the craft and to resistance has enriched the fabric of contemporary culture, not only in Ukraine but internationally as well. Space and time should be devoted to analyze the new forms of international collaborative art Ukrainian cultural workers have sparked in these close to four years of the war.
***
Talking about space and time, personally, I have been in awe of how over the past almost four years, Ukrainians, both ordinary citizens and creatives, have experimented and found ways of communicating beyond their country’s borders their lived experience during wartime, its philosophical ramifications, the continuity and ruptures it presents vis a vis their previous ‘ordinary’ life and other historical experiences, of war, what it means to experience war when technology and social media are so predominant in people’s lives, both as a threat and an opportunity. Their contributions have not been limited to a journalistic or witness approach, there has been deep thinking and conceptualization that can be extended to a more universalistic scope, as can be testified by this very conference taking place in a front-line city like Kharkiv, in the midst of ongoing Russian attacks even on kindergartens and within uncertain prospects for the future.
I have had the privilege of observing the reverberations of the endeavors of Ukrainian artists and scholars both in Italy and in the United States and have come to appreciate the ability of Ukrainian creatives to form communities and collaborations abroad, often with the help of Ukrainian associations of the diaspora, in cities and towns all over the world. In many cases, these cultural efforts that have inspired networks of people who after exposure to the Ukrainian situation and its creative products elaborate its relevance to their own lives, not only as a direct consequence of the war but in relation to the thinking and creativity issuing from the distilled, intense experience of war and concentrated conceptual efforts made by those who endure it directly.
Observing and writing in a position that is removed from the direct, daily impacts of that conflict, I am impressed by the back and forth between cultural and artistic production in Ukraine and artists who operate abroad, in a way that goes beyond the unidirectional extraction of solidarity and support. In my opinion, the contributions of this multidirectional process exceed the concept of cultural diplomacy, no matter how well executed. It is a process that deserves extensive study and my contribution today only scratches the surface.
In this context I would like to talk about the time and space of Porcelain War. Born before the 2022 war erupted, as a collaboration between US based director Brendan Bellomo Slava Leontyev and Anya Stasenko, both professional porcelain artists based in Kharkiv. Initially their joint project was to be an animated film made by a Polish animation group using images inspired by some of the porcelain figurines, with storytelling based on the paintings by Anya. But as the project was unfolding, the Russian Federation started the full-scale invasion of Ukraine and both artists and their friend and painter Andrey Stefanov (who later shot some of the footage for the documentary) decided to stay, with Slava taking on responsibilities for weapons training of civilians at the same time. This shift in circumstances prompted Bellomo to recognize the importance of telling the story of how artists could turn into resisters, not only with their art but with weapons as well. In a way he was responding in the affirmative to that last call “give me a sign that you hear me” raised by the limbless soldier in Khraznahorkai’s trench, and in a way all that soldier’s endless talk about globalization, technology and the media took a turn for the good, in real life, as shall be seen by the way the film was made.
Based on his hunch that recording the daily life of resisters who were artists would be of interest to international audiences, Bellomo proceeded to ship Go Pro cameras that would allow the husband-and-wife artist team and their painter friend to film their daily life in a war zone, though as artist neither Slava, Anja or Andrey had any experience in filmmaking. Separated by 6000 miles and initially needing translators to communicate over Zoom sessions in different time zones, artists who had no experience with camera work were guided to become proficient, over the course of a year and deliver an award-winning film.[18] For one year, the daily takes were secretly uploaded every night to Australia for storage and production with Songbird studio[19], following strict security protocols to prevent the interference of Russian hackers. Besides making daily takes for the film, in a variety of spaces from battle fields to the woods, to the workshop, to a variety of front-line city settings which showed military resistance, equal time was devoted to documenting through film the daily cultural endeavor to stay human and not succumb to the asymmetry of the situation.
The juxtaposition between footage from the combat zones, the artist workshop and the daily life are particularly jarring and effective. In one of the scenes filmed in the workshop, Anya was particularly adamant in her intention to not renounce beauty, both in observation and creation, and stated her commitment to not give up her memories and identity, but rather continue to emboss it on the porcelain, to be transmitted to others. Having recognized the Russian intention to deny the existence of Ukrainian cultural identity and actually silence her story, she saw her insistence on creating as a form of resistance. In many interviews that she gave at film presentation she kept emphasizing the need to retain the ability to continue the storytelling of her life through the painting of the whimsical figurines made by her husband, the dispensing of beauty through color and her portrayal of the natural world. A triumph for the imagination over death and destruction. The war was not going to put an end to it, it was her duty to resist with whatever means she had at her disposal, which might be paintbrushes, colors and imagination. Anya’s stories, her childhood recollections and dream world come alive through the animation of the BluBlu studios of Poland, while the musical score by the folk group Dakha Brakha[20] amplifies the emotional, sensory texture, fusing folk tradition with modernity.
One of the most affecting scenes is in fact a walk through the woods, in which Anya also notes down the location of unexploded landmines, an activity which would later be incorporated in her storytelling painted on the porcelain figurines in the workshop. As she walks through the woods, glorious in their autumnal display of colors in spite of being very close to the battlefield, Anya comments that it will take decades if not hundreds of years to find and remove all the landmines, as Ukraine, at this moment, contains the largest number of unexploded ordinance anywhere in the world hiding in its territory, with the dire consequences that it entails (at present Ukraine is the country that has the highest demand in the world for prosthetic limbs). Thus, the present and the future are entangled in artwork (both the filmmaking and the porcelain figurines) as an activity bringing together a practical act of self-defense and its recording through art. Space and time, present and future united in a single shot against attempts at erasure, in which beauty and the commitment to one’s truth and love, achieve the strength of porcelain, ready to withstand the centuries and share the beauty and strength of its fragments worldwide.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Nature: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Indiana University Press, 2010.
Amanpour and Company. “Porcelain War:”Ukrainian Artists on Living, Fighting and Creating Amid War.” Hari Sreenivasan interviews director Brendan Bellomo and artists Slava Leontyev and Anya Stasenko. Aired January 13, 2025. Retrieved 25 October, 2025.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination, Austin: Univ. of Texas Press. 1981.
Beckett, Samuel. En attendant Godot: A tragicomedy in two acts. Led Editions de Minuit, 1952.
Bellomo, Brendan and Leontyev, Slava. Directors Porcelain War, full length feature documentary. Websiteporcelainwar.com. Retrieved 25 October, 2025.
Bourne, Victoria. “Oscar-nominated documentary produced in Sydney kept secret for a year due to fears of Russian interference”. Abc.net.au. February 2025. Retrieved 25 October, 2025.
Dhaka Brakha. Soundtrack in Porcelain War website https://www.porcelainwar.com/soundtrack. Retrieved 25 October, 2025.
Grabovska, Mariya. “The Woman doesn’t want to wake up crazy: Selected poems by Mariya Grabovska”. The Dreaming Machine n. 13, December 2023. Retrieved 25 October, 2025.
Griffin, Susan. A Chorus of Stones – The Private Life of War. Doubleday. 1992.
Kiva, Iya. La guerra è sempre seduta su tutte le sedie / війна завжди сидить відразу на всіх стільцях. Italian translation by Yuliya Chernyshova and Pina Piccolo. La Vita Felice. 2024.
Kiva, Iya. “In Wartime Everything Is a Verb”. Re/Visions Journal, October 2025, English translation by Ross Singleton, copy-edited by Katharine Quinn-Judge. Retrieved 25 October 2025.
Kraznahorkai, Lazlo. “An Angel Passed Above Us”, English translation by John Batki, in The Yale Review, February 24, 2025. Retrieved 25 October, 2025.
Plumwood, Val. Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason. Abingdon. Routledge. 2002.
Shandra, Alya. “Russian drone kills 84-year-old goat herder who refused to abandon her animals”. Euromaidan Pres. Retrieved 25 October, 2025.
Shevtsova, Maryna, ed. Feminist Perspective on Russia’s War in Ukraine. Includes a chapter written by Mariya Shcharbyna, Chapter 6, “ Rsn Pzd: Obscenity in Ukrainian Women’s Voices Throughout Russian invasion of Ukraine “(co-authored with Olga Zvyeryeva,). Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2024.
Shuvalova, Iryna. “Voices of the war in Donbas: exploring identities in the affected communities through the prism of war songs”. Ph.D. Thesis, 2020, University of Cambridge.
Shuvalova, Iryna. “great water triptych”, in Klimaaksion / Norwegian Writers’ Climate campaign NWCC, English translation by Uilleam Blacker. August 2023. Klimaaksion website. Retrieved October 25, 2025.
Shuvalova, Iryna. Iya Kiva: ”My writing stemmed from this feeling of otherness”. Craftmagazine.net. 30 November 2024. Retrieved 25 October, 2025.
Smolina, Olha, ed. Modern and Contemporary Culture- Research, Heritage protection, Socialization, Shcherbyna, Mariya. “It Helps Me to Fight: Socio-Cultural perceptions and artistic Expressions of Women’s anger Amidst Russia’s Full-Scale Invasion of Ukraine” chapter co-authored with Oleksii Prokopenko, pp. 139- 156. Institute of Balkan Studies & Centre of Thracology – Bulgarian Academy of Science, 2024.
Zabrisky, Zarina. Kherson: Human Safari, director full length, feature documentary. Documentary website is linked at khersonhumansafari.com. Retrieved 25 October 2025.
Zychowicz, Jessica, ed. Freedom Taking place: War, Women and Culture at the Intersection of Ukraine, Poland and Belarus. Chapter 2, Shuvalova Iryna, “Stasik: Problematizing Representations of femininity in Wartime Ukraine through Popular Music”. Vernon Press, 2023.
[1] Bellomo, Brendan and Leontyev, Slava. Porcelain War, 2024 documentary film directed by Brendan Bellomo and Slava Leontyev, produced by Songbird Studios. It premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival where it won the U.S. Documentary Competition Grand Jury Prize. In 2025 it received a nomination for the 97th Academy Awards for Best Documentary Feature Film. Documentary website linked at porcelainwar.com. Retrieved 25 October 2025.
[2] Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination, Austin: Univ. of Texas Press. 1981. In his 1937 essay “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel”, Mikhail Bakhtin writes: We will give the name chronotope (literally, ‘time space’) to the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature. This term [space-time] is employed in mathematics, and was introduced as part of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. The special meaning it has in relativity theory is not important for our purposes; we are borrowing it for literary criticism almost as a metaphor (almost, but not entirely). What counts for us is the fact that it expresses the inseparability of space and time (time as the fourth dimension of space). We understand the chronotope as a formally constitutive category of literature.
[3] Kraznahorkai, Lazlo. “An Angel Passed Above Us”, English translation by John Batki, in The Yale Review, February 24, 2025. Retrieved, October 25, 2025.
[4] Beckett, Samuel. En attendant Godot: A tragicomedy in two acts. Led Editions de Minuit, 1952. The English edition, Waiting for Godot, was published in 1956 by Faber and Faber.
[5] Kiva, Iya. “In Wartime Everything Is a Verb”. Re/Visions Journal, October 2025, English translation by Ross Singleton, copy-edited by Katharine Quinn-Judge. Retrieved 25 October 2025.
[6] Kiva, Iya. La guerra è sempre seduta su tutte le sedie / війна завжди сидить відразу на всіх стільцях. Milan. La Vita Felice. 2024. Italian translation Yuliya Chernyshova and Pina Piccolo; Introduction (pp. 5-10) by Pina Piccolo, Afterword (pp. 113-117) by Yuliya Chernyshova.
[7] Zabrisky, Zarina. Kherson: Human Safari. Feature length documentary film directed by Zarina Zabrisky, released in 2025, based entirely on original footage and interviews. Link to documentary webpage can be found at https://khersonhumansafari.com.com. Retrieved 25 October, 2025.
[8] Shandra, Alya. “Russian drone kills 84-year-old goat herder who refused to abandon her animals”. Euromaidan Pres. Retrieved 25 October, 2025.
[9] Shuvalova, Iryna. Iya Kiva:”My writing stemmed from this feeling of otherness”. Craftmagazine.net. 30 November 2024.
[10] Griffin, Susan. A Chorus of Stones – The Private Life of War. Doubleday. 1992.
[11] Shuvalova, Iryna. “Voices of the war in Donbas: exploring identities in the affected communities through the prism of war songs”. Ph.D. Thesis, 2020, University of Cambridge.
[12] Zychowicz, Jessica, ed. Freedom Taking place: War, Women and Culture at the Intersection of Ukraine, Poland and Belarus. Chapter 2, Shuvalova Iryna, “Stasik: Problematizing Representations of femininity in Wartime Ukraine through Popular Music”. Vernon Press, 2023.
[13] Shuvalova, Iryna. “great water triptych”, in Klimaaksion / Norwegian Writers’ Climate campaign NWCC, English translation by Uilleam Blacker. August 2023. Klimaaksion website. Retrieved October 25, 2025.
[14]Alaimo, Stacy. Bodily Nature: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Indiana University Press, 2010.
[15] Plumwood, Val. Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason. Abingdon. Routledge. 2002.
[16] Shevtsova, Maryna, ed. Feminist Perspective on Russia’s War in Ukraine. Includes a chapter written by Mariya Shcharbyna: Chapter 6: Rsn Pzd: Obscenity in Ukrainian Women’s Voices Throughout Russian invasion of Ukraine (co-authored with Olga Zvyeryeva,). Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2024.
Smolina, Olha, ed. Modern and Contemporary Culture- Research, Heritage Protection, Socialization, Shcherbyna, Mariya. “It Helps Me to Fight: Socio-Cultural perceptions and artistic Expressions of Women’s Anger Amidst Russia’s Full-Scale Invasion of Ukraine” chapter co-authored with Oleksii Prokopenko, pp. 139- 156. Institute of Balkan Studies & Centre of Thracology – Bulgarian Academy of Science, 2024.
[17] Grabovska, Mariya. “The Woman doesn’t want to wake up crazy: Selected poems by Mariya Grabovska”. The Dreaming Machine n. 13, December 2023. Retrieved 25 October, 2025.
[18] Amanpour and Company. “Porcelain War:” Ukrainian Artists on Living, Fighting and Creating Amid War”. Hari Sreenivasan interviews director Brendan Bellomo and artists Slava Leontyev and Anya Stasenko. Aired January 13, 2025. Retrieved 25 October, 2025.
[19] Bourne, Victoria. “Oscar-nominated documentary produced in Sydney kept secret for a year due to fears of Russian interference”. Abc.net.au. February 2025. Retrieved 25 October, 2025
[20] Dhaka Brakha. Soundtrack in Porcelain War website https://www.porcelainwar.com/soundtrack. Retrieved 25 October, 2025.
Cover image courtesy of Tulsa Public Radio article on film screening of Porcelain War https://www.publicradiotulsa.org/local-regional/2025-01-10/circle-cinema-screens-porcelain-war-documentary-about-ukrainians-choosing-art-amid-violence