Olia Fedorova and Dana Kavelina by Monika Fabijanska

MONIKA FABIJANSKAOlia, let’s begin with your photograph titled Defense from 2017. It shows your outdoor installation, a kind of poetic take on land art.

OLIA FEDOROVAThis work is very important to me because it was my first work in landscape. It’s an intervention in the landscape, which I practice a lot. The piece was made while I participated in Mythogenesis, a festival of land art in Nemyriv in the Vinnytsia region. It’s a unique winter event that has been held for a decade, every year except this one.

I made these large paper sculptures in the form of anti-tank hedgehogs and installed them in a snowy landscape. I played with the contrast between the fragility of paper and the function associated with this form. Since 2014, when the war actually started, anti-tank hedgehogs have become fully integrated into Ukrainian reality. Rendering them in paper speaks to how vulnerable we are, how our state of mind during the war cannot be defended with anything like hedgehogs because living under war conditions is brutal.

Even before the full-scale invasion in February 2022, when in some parts of Ukraine the war couldn’t be felt, it was present in our souls and minds. Trying to escape from the war was like trying to protect yourself with paper against full-metal tanks.

MFI imagine that as an artist who has worked primarily with the concept of Ukrainian landscape as a semantic space—directly in landscape—you are experiencing the loss of your subject.

OFI don’t know if I will ever be able to work with the Ukrainian landscape again. Some landscapes have become dangerous because of mines and burned tanks. But also, Ukrainian landscapes have now totally changed their meaning. If you work with the landscape in Ukraine now, you’d work with the war, no matter if you want to or not.

MFDana, your series of pencil drawings titled Communications. Exit to the Blind Spot (2019), are part of a broader project, with an overarching theme of rape as a weapon of war, used with the intention to destroy people.

DANA KAVELINAI’ve been occupied with one big project for the last four years, which is a feature film, or rather a video installation. I started by doing drawings and writing a poetic text based on my research about war rape. In this series of drawings, I wanted to show rape not just as a collateral consequence of war but rather as its essence. I’m trying to reveal the ultimate logic of war rape and its multiple purposes, and why it should be considered a weapon of war.

Many women raped during the war in Bosnia—and in other wars—gave birth to the enemy’s children. This has a lifelong impact on a woman. Speaking out against war from a gendered perspective also opens the space for undermining the heroization that follows every war. Each monument to a hero has a shadow, and in this shadow lie bodies that were damaged, and all the voices that are constantly silenced in order to preserve the glorification of the victorious people or states.

This series of drawings was exhibited in a 2019 group show, War in a Museum, at the Kmytiv Museum of Soviet Art. That exhibition was very important for me because the drawings were placed in between monumental Soviet paintings that glorify the history of war, while my small and fragile-looking works on paper were there to create a dialogue with them and reveal this shadow.

As we know, the Russian army uses mass rape as a weapon of war right now. We will have a lot of work to find a way to record this history and preserve this memory so that it doesn’t leave blind spots, which are always used to manipulate the history of violence, again and again.

MFCan you tell us about your feature film project that began with these drawings?

DKThe project, which is still in progress, consists of four parts, which I conceived in an attempt to gather women’s experiences during times of military violence. They are about the 1941 pogroms during the Holocaust in Lviv, the Chechen deportation in 1944, the war in Bosnia from 1992–95, and the war in Donbas, which started in 2014. It’s not obvious what all these histories have in common but they are all recurring in a way. For example, the deportation of the Chechens, ordered by Stalin, came back as unresolved trauma during the Chechen wars in the 1990s. And the Bosnian war reverberated with the history of the Second World War in Yugoslavia. I think the war in Donbas also brought out a lot of references to our own history at the beginning of the twentieth century.

In a way, my project is an attempt to speak about history as a whole without leaving out the blind spots, in order to not leave any wounds untreated. History is located in the human body, so I had to tell it in the form of a monologue of a victim who is resurrected in the film’s narrative and gives her testimony. History doesn’t actually have truth or a set of objective facts. That’s why how it is written and who writes it is so very important. In my mind, the right and the power to write history must be given to the ones who were deprived of it for thousands of years—to the oppressed, to women, to non-whites, and to the dead who would be resurrected and tell their history the way they would like to. So I work with reversing history, reversing archival footage, and also in a way reshaping the facts, in order to create this model of history as a space of imagination, a space for utopia.

MFThe film is going to be titled Mother Srebrenica Mother Donbas. Your works in the exhibition—both the drawings and the film Letter to a Turtledove, about which we’ll talk in a moment—are connected to this overarching film project.

After I had invited Olia to present the photograph Defense in Women at War—she was still in Kharkiv—I noticed that she started posting poem-prayers on Instagram. I asked whether there was a chance to get one to New York. For me, it is the most direct, physical document of the unfolding war that continues to cause pain and damage as we speak. Olia, could you talk about your series of poems?

OFI mostly work with landscapes, but I often also employ text and handwriting. For me, the writing practice is meditative; it’s self-therapy. When the full-scale war started on February 24, I was in Kharkiv, which was being heavily bombed at the time. While coping with the situation and the fact that I had to spend time in the bomb shelter, I wanted to stay productive. I also wanted to raise awareness internationally about our situation through social media. I realized that what keeps me sane is rage. Anger is an emotion considered very productive by many psychologists. Since I couldn’t work with the landscape, I decided to turn to writing as an art practice. It was something I could do in the bomb shelter. But I didn’t have any paper of proper size so I used textiles to write on. I just started writing these poems that were composed of the words of rage that I had inside me. Posting them on Instagram, I learned that people shared my feelings.

The very first work from this series was from March 24:

I won’t go. I won’t fall. I will stand.
I won’t let you shed my blood.
The only blood you will see will be yours.
Bite me—and you’ll crack your teeth on me.
Tear me—and you’ll shred your claws on me.
Beat me—and you will break yourself.
I will stand. And I am standing.
And you’d better run while you can.

Some poems were like curses, like ancient prayers or spells that I heard from my great grandparents or read in books. I wanted to put my rage in a curse, as magic power. The poem shown in the exhibition was the third in the series:

May you choke on my soil.
May you poison yourself with my air.
May you drown in my waters.
May you burn in my sunlight.
May you stay restless all day and all night long.
And may you be afraid every second.

I’ve done ten poems but some are split between two or four sheets of fabric. The last one in the series I made just before I had to leave Ukraine in May. It has a totally different mood.

My Lord
Please give me strength to always remember who I am,
And to resist those who want to force me to become who I am not.
Don’t let me ever forget my roots,
But also don’t let the past engulf me.
Give me enough rage to keep fighting,
And may pain and anger not poison my soul anymore.
Come to me and do not leave me when I am vulnerable.
Give me the merciful dreams and save me from horrible nightmares.
Amen.

MF(sighs) You’re probably the only person in the world who can read this with their voice not breaking.

I’m glad you spoke about anger and rage. Even I, being at the other end of the world, when processing the first hours, days, and weeks of the invasion, struggled between my pacifism and fury. I encourage everyone to go to Olia’s website and read all ten poems to see how they evolved; how feelings changed over time. These writings have become a document of an internal landscape.

Both of you include writing in your art. Dana, your film Letter to a Turtledove has a voice-over text you wrote as a stream of consciousness.

DKI write all texts for my films—not as a script but as a poetic monologue which I then try to envision in images. Only then can I imagine the moving images, not before. It’s fundamental for me to first write a text.

I started doing Letter to a Turtledove two and a half years ago while preparing the fourth part of my full-feature film, the part that was to be about Donbas. My research had yielded such a huge amount of footage that I understood that there had to be a separate space for what I wanted to say about Donbas. And that became this twenty-minute film.

I collage a lot of different found footage because the film brings together different times in Donbas, so that they speak to each other. It’s very important to understand that the war and the violence in Donbas is not new to this land. Donbas was historically a place of many contradictions that still exist in Ukraine today. I thought that in the history of Donbas, like in a crystal, we can see almost all the problems of today’s Ukraine.

In the 1920s and ’30s, Donbas was a place of inexhaustible labor enthusiasm and also unimaginable exploitation. The history of Donbas unfolds as a history of colonization—the first metal works and mines in the region were created there by a Welsh businessman, John Hughes. Donetsk, one of the main cities, was originally named after him: Yuzovka. Industrialists established their enterprises in Donbas importing laborers mostly from elsewhere in the Russian Empire.

In the 1930s, under Stalin, there were terrible repressions, poverty, misery, and hunger. The Holodomor, the Terror-Famine in 1932–33, killed millions of Ukrainians. And then came the Second World War.

In my film, in the Soviet footage from the 1970s, Donetsk is a prosperous city and gets the nickname of the city of a million roses. We see these roses, happy people walking around parks, a children’s railway which was a pride of Donetsk, and we understand how people have the agency to overcome their history. It gave me a lot of hope but also despair seeing the two fragments of found footage—which are a hundred years apart—coming together. There were tanks in Donbas and now there are tanks again, but for a time Donetsk looked prosperous. Cities have been destroyed, reerected, and then destroyed again.

The addressee of the film was Ukrainian society, which is a multiplicity of social forces and different political agendas. I see this film as losing its relevance now because the space for discussions about history has imploded or collapsed. Also, there’s no one to debate with about Donbas’s history because the war makes us into a totality, producing urgencies of a different kind. Ukrainians now stand as one entity. Our struggle, and also the ongoing war, is the fight for the right to have history and the right to deal with political contradictions in our own society. Because if we cannot defend ourselves and preserve Ukraine, there will be no history, no one to write history and rewrite it. That is why we must struggle to create a space to think about Donbas again. But right now, too many people live in a completely upended temporality, one stitched of very small fragments—a day or an hour, and another hour. And there’s no space to think much about the past.

MFThe war conflated Ukraine into a one-dimensional being: a victim-enemy of Russia. War flattens everything, and the society has just one purpose: to defend itself. The nuances that are present in your and Olia’s works are frozen for the moment. But because art and artists endure, these ideas can be preserved for the future and will continue once peace returns.

More than ever before, I’m aware of the depth of your analysis of the reality engulfing you, of the role art plays in the time of war, and of the potential of feminist historiography. What if women had written history for all these years? I’ve always been tempted to ask: would war even be its central theme? We can’t answer these questions but I know that they are important to you.

DKI constantly think, What can memory look like after the war ends? How can we preserve all the complexities of what is going on right now on so many different levels? I also used to think a lot about monuments as objects preserving memory. When I try to imagine a utopian monument, it could be an endless matrix or a network of texts that are embodied in names that are forever alive and overlapping. I imagine a space where no voice is too weak to be heard and no voice is excluded. No one is silenced in this imagined space of memory. That is what we have to struggle for because so many voices will be silenced and others can be left unheard after a war. And these unheard voices—these ghosts that will be haunting us for life—they do not go away, and sometimes, a hundred years later, they demand answers.

I see this also as a reason why violence can return. For me, speaking out about the whole extent of the terror and about the most nightmarish experiences is the way to get the wounds treated and closed forever. I mean, to imagine myself working in the future is also such a privilege—of giving away the responsibility to fight in the field to others. Someone has to die for me, so that I can have this privilege to think about memory or to create a monument of sorts.

Nowadays, wartime allows only for the simplest and also for the most difficult: doing things on the ground. But if there will ever be a future for us, I see my work as the struggle for the weakest voices, and I think that we need to invent a historiography that includes them.

MFThis is a comprehensive concept of feminist historiography which doesn’t focus just on women but gives hope to everyone who has been overlooked, unheard, or silenced. As you develop your ideas, it is also clear that this is how you manifest them visually in your works. You call for a “matrix historiography” that would represent all these conflicted voices. This is reflected in the collage structure of your film.

Olia, you spoke about what tremendous role art played for you in keeping you sane (and not only yourself but also others). Making art is a service, especially in a situation of crisis. What can you tell us from your perspective about being an artist during a war, especially as you chose to stay in Kharkiv for so long, facing direct danger?

OFI remember the time just before the full-scale war started, those several months when Russian troops started gathering around our borders. There was a sense of menace, and uncertainty was in the air. At that time everyone was thinking about what each of us would be doing if the war started. I remember feeling really broken because of this uncertainty. I thought that as an artist, I would be the most useless person in the war. I even thought, Okay, I should probably take up arms or learn medical first aid. That way I would be more useful for my country. Making art seemed like something from a life that didn’t exist anymore. I knew, though, that I could not just take up a machine gun and go fight and kill people for real. It’s not as easy as some people make it look on TikTok. It’s really hard—war breaks people.

Once the invasion started, it was clear that there’s no in-between; it’s only: would you rather die or survive? I came to realize that making art helps me survive, and it also helps me to do something for my country. As an artist I can appeal to people’s feelings. The news describe in a dry way what’s going on. Artists can communicate reality through their own personal experience and strike people right in the heart. And this might make people do something for Ukraine, like protesting, donating money, or helping refugees. That’s why I stayed in Kharkiv for so long, because I needed to be there as long as possible to relay my personal experience. Because the shelter I stayed in was rather safe—if you can use that word—I had a lesser chance of dying, and I used that possibility while I could.

As for feminist and women’s art right now, this war is a unique situation. It is not something that was meant to be this way—men cannot leave the country and only female artists can go abroad and be the representatives of these personal experiences. They can speak out for their male colleagues and present their art; I know several people who have brought artworks by male Ukrainian artists to Europe or the US.

MFI am very grateful that you speak about the reality of war to those of us who don’t have the experience of total destruction and no place to hide from it. People might imagine what they would do, but in a war, all this imagining is worth nothing because there are only two things you can do: stay or flee; kill or be killed . . .

Can both of you speak to vulnerability as part of a broader cultural change?

DKI have been thinking a lot about the power of vulnerability, and when I thought about vulnerability as a central image of my work, I always imagined a small flower or something that is ultimately vulnerable. There’s no wind that can destroy a flower; it is so supple that it’s hard to break. In Ukrainian folk songs and poetry, there are metaphors of plants being bent by wind or by a boot but then standing upright again. I think vulnerability is a very good skill to learn in order to become strong. In order to fight, you have to protect your vulnerability.

OFI agree that we need vulnerability to be able to fight. I felt it a lot when I was in Kharkiv. To fight and survive you need to get rid of the unnecessary emotions so you concentrate all your efforts, physical and mental, on the only aim, which is to survive. It worked at first, for some time, but then—and that’s the most horrible thing in the war—your resources get exhausted. You cannot be a fighter or a warrior forever. You need to regain your vulnerability, your ability to feel something.

During the first week of the war . . . I don’t remember eating much. The adrenaline that cried “survive, survive!” substituted any other requirements of the body or the mind. Eventually, the only way for me to be able to function was unfortunately to leave Ukraine. Many people don’t have that option.

It feels like a privilege to leave and to stay in some safe place where I can start feeling vulnerable again, bit by bit. This is really tragic—we are going to have a lot of people who fought all this time. Like in the flower metaphor, to resist the power of the enemy’s boot, you need to make your skin firm, you need to turn into a rock flower. But as soon as your skin hardens it is easy to break.

DKIf I can add something—my thinking just aligned with yours about the privilege to expose one’s vulnerability. Almost all bodies are vulnerable in the territory of war. There is, of course, the endless continuum in the levels of vulnerability: for example, women’s bodies are more vulnerable, and aged women’s bodies are even more vulnerable, and disabled aged women’s bodies, and so on. I’m thinking about exposing vulnerability as strength or power. This is a big privilege and many people are now deprived of the right to be vulnerable, or to feel, or to expose their vulnerability to the world, like artists are able to do. So now I rethink and reconsider the question of vulnerability because I also imagined my body as a flower in the past. Now this flower has to learn to hold a gun as well.