At several stops within this performative reading session at the St. Nikolai Memorial, artist Dariia Kuzmych reads from her texts written in recent years in Kyiv as reflections on Russian war against Ukraine.

***

There are no images produced here, but coexistence is lived. The image is not yet developed.

The sky, adorned with cirrus, cumulus, and claw-like clouds, captivates the gaze and promises freedom. In contrast, the airspace is riddled with slashes—torn and dissected. The cuts in the sky pull one back into the past. The whistle of a rocket remains lodged in the sphere of thought, leaving its marks long after. The sky is no longer just the sky. The air is clamped in suspense, awaiting the next rupture—flight.

Another airspace is a clockface with precisely regimented intervals, divided by wings — totalitarian, militarised sky. Every hour of upward gaze is accounted for: children playing with toy aeroplanes; air defence beams against a notional enemy aircraft; a view through blossoming apple tree branches into blue skies with fighter jets; and a harvest scene. It’s a gaze backwards into a historical past that transformed into a machinery of annihilation. The meaning is twisted. Readiness for aggression is forged under the guise of defence. Indecision and ambivalences from positions of power leave a space open, where violence and spaces of attack spread.

The shock wave knocks the established structures and connections down; the dust settles, and you can't recognize faces. Every day, these shock waves and their echoes pierce spaces and hearts, cutting us apart and fixing our gaze on the places of rupture. In the airspace, in the body, in the space of thought, coming words wobble, grin, howl, drone: language itself, after it falls apart, gathers itself again. From a distance, the mutilated bodies transfigure into outlines without details. The image has not formed but remains a shock wave. The image reveals itself in its absence.

After the attack is before the attack.