Ended the year 2022 working more than usual, but am glad to have worked on that which I was so busy with. It’s OïDA, a soundwalk album that was created along with Dima Levytskyi, Ukrainian theater director and initiator of Miskyi theatre (City theater) in Kyiv and other brilliant artists, them also part of Miskyi theater: Mariia Borysova, Svitlana Dovhan, Oleksii Podat, Ivan Skoryna, Ihor Babaiev.

What is a soundwalk? It’s as it sounds – a walk with sound, a tourgide of a sorts, put the headphones, press play and walk along with the voice that guides you. It can guide you in a photograph, as Dima’s voice did in Audiophoto. Kyiv on May 27, 2022. It can guide you through an underground passage, wherever in the world you may be, teaching you ballet as you go – just as Mariia does in her walk Nowhere. Nowhen. It can be a walk with clear points of departure and arrival, following the trenches and alongside of those – intimate live stories of the guide that is taking you there. This is the approach Svitlana has taken to create A Walk Between the Trenches. It can also be a story of somebody else, sharing their pain and longing and loss, as you’ll hear in Ihor’s Voices From Bakhmut.

I was honored to work with these people that continue their creative practice despite this horrid war, and it feels like this practice is also part of the fight against the dark powers. It feels like they have read and put to practice the words of Diane di Prima (must remember to read her poem RANT in its entirety every time I forget why I do all I do):

w/out imagination there is no memory
w/out imagination there is no sensation
w/out imagination there is no will, desire

history is a living weapon in yr hand
& you have imagined it <…>

The war that matters is the war against the imagination
all other wars are subsumed by it.

So they fight the war against the imagination, best way each knows how. If you feel like giving a hand in it, please share and if have means, support OïDA financially – all the money from this release goes directly to Hospitallers, a paramedic batallion helping on the front in Ukraine.

This album would not have been what it has become without a number of other people that must be mentioned: Lucy Zoria (voice), Yevhenii Chaban (recording), Dmytro Kozak (translations), Andrei Vazyanau (translation), Iryna Rybakova (photo – poster), Ignas Andriuškevičius (mastering), Inga Navickaitė-Drąsutė, @ Hands On Press (design, layout, risography, photos of the album too!).

With this project I rounded up Matters. Platform for Industrial Culture (or here). I’ve initiated and run it since 2018, as part of Kaunas Capital of Culture 2022, financed by Kaunas Municipality and since 2020 – part of Kaunas Artists’ House family. First year of the project ran three artist residencies which were formalized in an album, and helped me survive a massive breakdown. Second year felt like a caroussel of things as I was organising a non-format symposium (A-symposium) consisting of a series of various events (glad found the wonderful Gabriele Gervickaitė that regardless my madness agreed to take part in curatorial and organizational chaos), lectures, performances, gigs while writing my MA in Anthropology and trying to maintain some art practice too. 2020 started with, well, you know, and I was like – (what) do we do (at all)? Being a very poor artist with no certain income whatsoever, I thought that the platform might be great to support others like me, so that year was online micro-residencies (supporting artists for what they actually do, without making them to work on something new, as just surviving as it is was hard enough that year) which ended up in two lovely albums (one and two) and a series of great workshops in visual programming. Fourth year was tough, as there were still Cov-related uncertainties, but I had planned a learning experience for young artists – cause this is what I would have liked when I was a young(er) artist. But again, somehow all fell to places, and in a small break between Estonia and France, I ran this awesome soundcamp with brilliant lecturers that have – because of this platform! – also become some of my dearest friends. And the finale of all of this was, this year, a series of small gigs in not-entirely-habitual-concert-venues (fortresses, one underground passage on the side of the river and a former post sorting facility), all called OïDA, as a warm-up to this album.

Another thing I did over the last two years of the program was to create a mediatheque-type-of-a-corner in the reading room of Kaunas Artists’ House. So when in Kaunas, do not hesitate to pop in to listen to a bunch of good music / sound (players are there waiting for you), and read about sound as work, sound and work, soundings, sound philosophy, feminism and sound, listening, body and other things. The things are over and yet they never are, in a way.