Today we can observe how the surrounding phenomena are redefined in a paradoxical way. On the one hand, we perceive sounds around us, changes in the weather, once very familiar locations in a new light. Are they safe or are they a threat? On the other hand, we are traumatized by the loss of urban spaces and landscapes in which we were formed and, as it turned out, rooted. Such changes and the fact that we, along with the environment, have become a military target for damage and exhaustion, further contribute to the focus on the materiality of things.

It is currently impossible to understand the scale of losses — this is also true for environmental losses for which there is no available monitoring. But understanding losses also requires an understanding of the distinct temporality in which other species and forms of life exist. How will military equipment dumps affect the soil and the groundwater? To what extent will the hostilities and fires in nature reserves reduce diversity? How will the Azov and Black seas change due to the release of chemicals, oil, shipwrecks, and mines? This will leave a long-term record on the body of the Earth, and as a result, in our bodies and the bodies of future generations.

Theorizing pollution as a weapon in the war against Ukraine, researcher Svitlana Matviyenko points to how the slow nature of violence caused by the release of toxic chemicals, such as from missile strikes, often renders the damage imperceptible to human attention. Just as extreme incidents of violence that occur instantaneously — such as bombings — can be ‘invisible’ because of their ability to provoke shock and trauma: witnesses of war crimes often report that in their memories days collapse into a single sense of continuity (Svitlana Matviyenko, ‘Pollution as a Weapon of War’. Climate. Our Right to Breathe, L’Internationale Online, K. Verlag, 2022, 53-62).

Revealing what falls out of sight and is invisible seems to be another important task of the art laboratory and its participants.

Exploring the node of acquired knowledge and new sensitivity here and now can also influence our relationship with the environment, prompting us to build relationships based on equality and care instead of exploitation and depletion. This is especially relevant in the context of future rebuilding and restoration, when that what makes up our landscape will become building material.

On February 24, we found ourselves in a reality where there were no rational explanations, but there was an extreme concentration of being — right here, at the point of pain and resistance. This is what happens at the moment of injury: without even seeing what exactly injured us, we become beings focused on the point of pain. Not carriers of the mind, but the essence of being and the impossibility of action. The moment we are able to make the first effort of interpretation, we will have hope for survival. But at the moment of the impossibility of movement, we become total listening, sensing.

When we are living beings who constantly feel like targets, our vulnerability due to our own materiality becomes apparent. The fine line between life and non-existence turns out to be, not a metaphorical construct, but a very real feeling of your own skin as something that does not really separate you from the rest of the world. A missile strike can mix organic and inorganic into a single senseless and dead mass. Your own materiality is experienced anew as vulnerability and inseparability from the surrounding matter.

This inseparability gives us a feeling of extreme closeness to non-life, but at the same time, we acquire forms of sensitivity that were not so obvious before. We look at the shelled field and feel  pain. The earth is an extension of our body whose pain we feel. People in Ukraine are beginning to ask themselves: what is earth? the Earth? Where are we between mythology, economics, and the prosaic reality of the soldier’s trench?

It is tempting to talk about a special consciousness emerging right now, about us transforming into different beings who have acquired extra sensitivity and are able to feel the thoughts of non-humans. It is important for us to refrain from this temptation. The very knowledge of how different a creature — say, a plant — is compared to us allows us to say: we have no idea what it is ‘thinking’. There is an area of phenomenology that captures the phenomenon of plant thinking — a metaphor that describes an ultimately non-human rationality. Experiments with listening to energies are not within our competence.

We ask ourselves what exactly this experience of pain at the sight of a shelled field means to us. This is not rage about a spoiled resource. There is something very important about us here — about how this kinship with the ultimate  other works. We are reclaiming lands that are not property — they are the space of ourselves, a part of us, and we are a part of them. Protecting the earth from poisoning is not counting on its gratitude. It is about responsibility and understanding the inviolability of what we are not.

The temptation to use myths is too great, but so is the understanding of their inappropriateness. So what has art to do with it? Will it save us from war? Of course, it won’t. It will not stop, will not protect, will not raise the dead. Extreme pain cannot be stopped by art.

Art allows us to move and look for questions, the answers to which we feel, but cannot formulate until we have found the actual questions. Nothing is behind us yet, we are in the midst of an event that not all of us will survive. It so happened that art itself can grasp what neither science nor any analytics have reached. Art does not predict, but catches the most important emotion, allows us to share the experience that we all have, but may or may not become a field of reflection. Shared experiences allow us to take a step forward, capture something important, or shake off the accidental. Perhaps right now life and art are coming very close to each other. Art grows out of a touch with reality. Reality appears before us as recognizable-unrecognizable in an artistic gesture.