Today’s the day when the process will move to another level. Starting out from the untitled poem, our first week was dedicated to individual (although synchronized) reflective work. Now time has come to share the fruits; not the raw version of personal associations, memories and feelings – it would be impossible, anyway – but a consciously arranged set of words. My part is to form the conditions and to collect the responses. When gathered, they will expand and change our common space of thought.

The first e-mail has already arrived, and I’m waiting eagerly for more…

At this stage, access to the project is limited to volunteering participants, and the core process uses the e-mail format. My first step turned out to be based on a misunderstanding; a valuable reminder about the conditions of human communication. Two days into the project, we have already experienced difficulties, misinterpretations, unexpected openings and achievements… very interesting, indeed!

Here we go; the project starts today with the reading of a poem, originally written in Ukrainian and later rendered into English (note to self: I have to find out the name of the translator!)
…and now, over to Tanya Maria Litvinyuk:

We are cities, each one reminds megalopolis,
We have people who come and live inside us.
And we absorb people like sponges, as if we are bottomless,
And these people, certainly, really need us…

And we call people by names, like we call avenues,
We have many roads and not all of them are gorgeous,
And the sky that kisses the pavement is not always blue,
And people that breathe us in are not strong always…

It happens sometimes, that people want to move off,
To finally pick their things and get freedom, become unrestraint,
To start conversation with the best physician on Earth,
And to hang better routes they could have, on their chests.

It happens sometimes, that people want to avoid us,
For we cause the addiction, stronger than anything in the world,
And people want to see other megalopolises,
And people want to perceive other cities, to feel or keep hold…

And we do not care. We are solidly frozen forever…
Such majestic, such static megalopolises…
For what do we have to lose? Lots of inhabitants.
Today, I saw spring waving her arm from the train modestly…

Today, I’m proud to announce my invitation from curator Yulia Oleksandriv (Perfect Art Institution, Stockholm/Kyiv) to be part of the project Training the Fundamentals of a Democratic Society. Youth leaders and human rights activists from Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Belarus, Russia, Poland, Denmark and the Netherlands are gathering for a three-days’ workshop in Sweden, initiated by NGO Active Ukrainians in Europe and kindly supported by the Swedish International Centre for Local Democracy and the Swedish Agency for Youth and Civil Society.

My contribution will be to conduct a process where individual memories, associations and reflections are transferred and shared across linguistic and geographical borders. Ukrainian poet Tanya-Maria Litvinyuk will provide us a point of departure, and on August 28th we’ll arrive at Stockholm International Library to stage a multilingual performance. The travel in-between will take place in the unseen space of creative thought.

Tomorrow, we’ll be off!