2022/2023

Kateryna Mishchenko

Writer, publisher

Medusa, Kyiv

Born in 1984 in Poltava, Ukraine
Studied German and English Philology and World Literature at Kyiv National Linguistic University

Project

Time of Deep Snow. Essays

One of the central questions of my essayistic research is how loss and mourning construct the reality of individuals and shape the cityscape. The ongoing war will change many aspects of life in Ukraine and particularly the way of telling stories about things that happened before. This shift in mentality should be reflected in the project, as well as the possibility for keeping historical layers from vanishing in oblivion at the moment of total destruction. Along with the ruined temporality, I would like to research fractures in the language caused by the constant danger of living in war. The essays’ figures are contemporary citizens of Kyiv and its significant places represented, among other things, through the optics of popular culture, art, and cinema.

Recommended Reading

Mishchenko, Kateryna. “Ein schwarzer Kreis.” In Euromaidan: Was in der Ukraine auf dem Spiel steht, edited by Juri Andruchowytsch, 21–38. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2014.
–, ed. The Book of Kyiv – Kyjiwska knyzhka. A project of the School of Kyiv – Kyiv Biennial. Kyiv: Medusa, 2015.
Mishchenko, Kateryna, and Miron Zownir. Ukrainian Night – Ukraïnska nich. Leipzig: Spector Books, 2015.

Colloquium, 06.06.2023

Spaces of Change and Loneliness

Almost ten years ago, the last European revolution took place in Ukraine. That event quickly fell into the shadow of Russian intervention and the following occupation of the Crimean peninsula and parts of eastern Donetsk and Luhansk regions. And it glows in the even darker shadow of the Russian war of annihilation that began in February 2022.

This bird’s-eye view of the war’s prehistory cannot be avoided when talking about the Ukrainian present. Especially because the media spotlight has been thrown on the country only now, at the moment of its annihilation. The context should be explained. In addition to the explanatory function, the bird’s-eye view gives a sense of security, both for the mind and the body. But imagine that your gaze is guided by a film camera and suddenly quickly approaches the land where more and more spaces have been occupied by violence in the last decade.

Where the gaze stops, the uncertainty of human life already speaks. Its language is defined by losses, ruptures, and cracks on the surface. Its time expands or moves in a loop. While the de-struction is internalised by this fragile life, new inner spaces emerge. They are probably “grass-roots” spaces for the work of imagination and resistance. And it is probably here the inner chronicle of the present takes shape.