At the academy where I studied art in Ukraine, every day I passed a plaque with the names of dozens of repressed victims of Soviet camps and murdered artists. Many things and people in Ukrainian culture remained only as name plates in the cemetery: people's work was destroyed, they were killed. A lot of time passes before you realize that this is a loss, not an absence.

Time passes, new phenomena sprout from the cracks between the lost and the surviving, but everyone feels these empty places in themselves. Before the war, we thought how much of everything important is not described. And now, as in the 1930s and 1940s, they want to destroy us.

I don't want everything to be destroyed again, I don't want what was destroyed to be forgotten, I want the garden country to continue to grow. It was not the first time they came to destroy it. I don't want to forget anything. I am now a moving graveyard. This is my way of preserving what is destroyed around me and in me. The cemetery is a place of memories. A new life sprouts there, and the common garden in the cemetery is structured by various memories.

In this time, I have turned to my own works with the theme of utopia. For a long time, I did not consider utopia as a topic I could work with, because I am very familiar with how art can be a tool to devalue the living for the sake of utopia, as was the case in Soviet easel and monumental art. But after reading Barthes’ definition of utopia– not as totality and, as a result, the absence of politics, but as diversity that multiplies itself–I stopped being afraid to work with utopia and represent my utopian vision like a small garden in a large common garden.

So in my cemetery garden, I do a utopian act of resurrection, an act of disagreement with another reproduction of nameless graves, violence, murders. I don't agree with that. The world is still impossible without war, but I do not agree with this. --Kateryna Lisovenko