 Hello everyone. My name is Anastasia Manulyak. I am head of visual arts at the Ukrainian Institute. We are co-organizers of this event together with ArtsLink and I'm happy to start this event today. I have to say that now when Ukrainian cultural heritage is in constant danger because of shellings and bombings by Russia, Ukrainian art gains special meaning and relevance. And since the full-scale invasion of Russia on February 24, many artists in Ukraine and many art professionals had to change from their professional and artistic practices to military, became brilliant volunteers and Ukrainian cultural society is defending its agency and the right to speak up on the cultural battlefields in Ukraine and abroad. And for the Ukrainian Institute, an institution that is affiliated to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Ukraine and is representing Ukrainian culture. Internationally, these processes are especially visible and important. Therefore, when we have been invited to co-curate and co-organize this event, it was obvious for us that we would like to focus on building, establishing and maintaining connections within Ukrainian arts community. And I am very happy to see many familiar faces in this room and that we actually managed to gather all of you here to share and to go experience this. I would like to thank Artslink for initiating this idea, for helping and supporting us and for understanding the importance of Ukrainian art and culture nowadays. I would also like to thank Ujazdowsky Castle for their hospitality and their support. My thanks also goes to Gathe Institute and to Ionika Fund for their support and their confidence in the importance of this event. And especially to the curatorial team for our hours of inspiring and meaningful discussions and for this enormous support and efforts that we took. And I would like to pass the floor to you and let me introduce everyone who had been working on this. Anna Gaidai, Yulia Kostareva, Maria Volchonok, Yuri Kruchak, Andriy Dostlev and Liyya Dostlev. And I would like to pass the floor to you. And before I do that, I would also like to thank all of you to all of the Ukrainian artists, art professionals, our international guests for being here today and for everyone who is defending Ukrainian art and culture internationally and fighting for Ukraine and for Ukrainian agency. Thank you and the floor is yours. Hi everyone, I'm Liyya Dostlev. I think we will be speaking in Ukrainian. Good morning. I would like to thank to all of you who are present here and it's very great happiness to see such a big team of people here and to host such a big group of people here during such difficult times. And we have called this conference greener grass and it's a question with a question mark because basically we don't know where the grass is greener and what it means the grass is greener and should be defined where the grass is greener. Therefore, we would like to use this occasion and for these three days we would like to talk and to discuss what is going on, what we can do, in what direction we can move on. And I would like to thank to everyone who is present here and I would like to thank the armed forces of Ukraine because due to them we are able to have such meetings. So, to my colleagues. Good afternoon. My name is Anna. I'm very glad to see all of you. I'm very glad to be here. And I would like to thank to give a big thank you to the team of curators because it was a big pleasure to work with all of you. It was very comfortable to work with you. And we have discussed quite a lot of meaningful definitions. We have been discussing connections and society aspects and community aspects. And I think that we feel as if we are a community of cultural actors who are acting in different parts of the world and we should understand that we are all interconnected. Now we can think about how we can create a new mutual reality and we are trying to create nowadays but think about future, remembering about the past. So now we can be a big intellectual body and we can be together, we can be in this new reality. Thanks a lot to everyone and we will have more occasions to talk during these three days. I would also like to thank to the participants who are going to take part in discussion panels. I think to all of you because it's great courage that you were able to join us and I wish us all fruitful work. And now I would like to say a few words to Simon Dalfour from Artslink. Thank you everyone. So good morning. I'd like to welcome you to this assembly, Greener Grass. I'm delighted to welcome everyone and I'm really thankful that you could make the time to be here. I know for many of you the voyage here is complex and difficult but I thank you all for making the time to be here. I really want to thank the curators who were just here because they did an amazing job in terms of addressing what they saw as the issues and this need to bring Ukrainian artists and cultural leaders together. And this gathering I think is a very significant one to start to think about how we can address the future of Ukrainian culture post-war. What I have to say is we're here really under the worst imaginable circumstances. When we proposed this idea of bringing everyone together, which was in June, we really hoped by then, we're now nine months after the invasion, we really felt that the reconstruction of Ukraine would be beginning now and that artists would be part of that process of rebuilding civil society. However, we still seem to be a long way from an end to Russia's war and the needs of the cultural sector in Ukraine are really already immense, not to mention reimagining ways in which artists can work but also stay connected when they're displaced within the country and of course far beyond that too. But I think there's another perhaps greater challenge for this gathering, for this assembly, to reimagine how artists can be an integral part of the healing and the rebuilding of the very fabric of Ukrainian society. How can artists be catalysts for community dialogue and collective creative responses to Ukraine societies now immense and complex needs? For us, we sincerely believe that artists are our real hope, facilitating dialogue, building trust and cooperation, opening minds and stimulating creative thinking and positive action. This goes far beyond museums and arts buildings. They will get rebuilt as the capital infrastructure projects go gain momentum and get put into place. But I ask for something much more critical and for me much more important from this gathering. I ask that we imagine and we begin to construct an infrastructure for living artists to live and work within neighborhoods and communities and to create a new ecology that can support civil society, sustain artists and indeed help them to thrive. I think we need a new model that can place artists at the center of civic life in Ukraine and which also offers a blueprint for the rest of Europe and the rest of the world. Thank you all for making it here today. I'm looking forward to the deliberations over the next three days and I thank you all so much for joining us. Please participate in the conversations. We created very long lunch breaks, not so that you need to eat so much, but so that there's time for you to connect and to network and to converse. So lunch is at one, so please make your way to the castle. We have two dining rooms there, but then there's lots of time for networking and connecting. And the same over dinner at seven each day. So I hope you can stay with us over these three days and I look forward to meeting all of you. Thank you so much for being here.