 Simon said it's my name, which means I have to appear here. I cannot thank the organizers and curators enough for creating the chance for this event and for me personally to see all of you because I'm so thrilled, I'm so happy to see so many people I dearly love and miss. And I thank you very much for trusting me with the keynote speech because I come from the place where the grass is really very green. I live and work in Switzerland for six years. I mean, you cannot find the greener grass. Elsewhere, maybe in Ireland, but I tell you Switzerland is definitely greener and if I had a chance, I can talk at length about all the problems that you face in the places where the grass is really green but that's for another occasion. But today I came not alone, not just with my knowledge to deliver your keynote speech. I picked up the invitation from the organizers which actually came in summer to prepare a teaser, something which sort of will pre-open this meeting and will be online. And then I thought that we cannot possibly start thinking about the grass where it's greener or not without actually thinking of what's gonna happen or what is happening with Ukrainian culture today because if there is no culture, if it falls behind on all the priority lists for reconstruction which is in Ukraine, which will be in Ukraine, I mean, there's no talk about the grass whatsoever. So I invited a number of wonderful people, some of them actually are here. Some of them are not here to share a few very short thoughts and observations about what might need to be done or might need to be thought of when we look at the reconstruction of Ukrainian culture and then I will pick up after that. You might say that Ukraine is a very dangerous place right now. Yes, it is dangerous, but at the same time it is incredibly wonderful, incredibly creative, incredibly of future looking, incredibly brave. First, it's important to remember that Ukrainian culture is the basis of Ukrainian society and its resilience today. It's the basis of Ukrainian future as well because it helps us to project and imagine. What should we do to support this basis, Ukrainian culture? I think it's crucial to support Ukrainian creators, Ukrainian culture practitioners and their institutions in Ukraine. We need to have our culture in Ukraine to survive and to develop further. I think that we should start that our future is already, have been started on 24 February and we have to understand that we should not postpone anything, so we should start act. I don't know how, but we should. And also what is much more important to me just to communicate with different communities and to help each other, especially communities which are in quite dangerous situation like Crimea and the Tars, for example. We should make connections. We should discuss with each other questions and we should be productive. We should deal with actual problems, problems which are now and we should hold important perspective. This is, this means our own vision and to do with actual and to hold and to go to our vision position. First of all, it's delegation, authorities and responsibilities to the civil society. The next very important question, it's education in a sphere of culture. It's education really modern and actual for cultural managers, producers and curators to promote Ukrainian culture inside and abroad also. I represent the museum part of our industry. It is in the museum that we make sense of the past, reference of the present and plan for the future. What was not done safely before and what I would never do after the victory is the reduction of the budget for culture, cut budget for culture because it is a line of defense like the army. Culture is our registered card in this world but it is also a matter of security of Ukrainians in Ukraine as well as for all those who left Ukraine feeling the war. I think that for these years of war and the experience of violence we completely understand that we don't want to have someone who will tell us what we should do. What we should not take with us into the future I would express it with the word imitation. Imitation of justice, imitation of society, imitation of culture, imitation of education, imitation of thinking. One of the big things that we need to, in Ukraine that we need to develop in the future is a new distinction, a very non-postmodern distinction but I would say a very classical distinction between genuine and not genuine between something real and something which is just a copy, just an imitation, just a simulacrum. After the full scale invasion began Ukrainian culture workers were explaining through the culture tools about Ukraine, about our history and after we win we should invest in culture. We should prevent the propaganda. We should share our truth. It's the only way to build a free country and not to be scared of a neighbour who will attack us. It's important, I think, not to try to reconcile Ukrainians and Russians today. Why? It's very painful and even humiliating to Ukrainians. That's one thing. Another thing is that any such attempts distract Russians from doing what's most important now and they have to reimagine Russia. They have to make it a non-predator state. They have to work and any attempt on reconciliation distracts them from this work. But one thing I'm thinking about, I keep thinking about is this bravery because bravery of Ukrainian defenders, bravery of Ukrainian soldiers also translates into the bravery of thinking. I do hope that Ukrainian culture after our victory will keep this bravery. Bravery of thinking, bravery of imagination, bravery of culture, because actually bravery is precisely about this decolonisation. But at the same time, I do hope that this bravery will create this energy which will create the new Ukrainian and maybe European renaissance. I think this very obviously very home-made video actually reflects the condition in which it was made because the people were, and I'm very grateful to them, were jumping to record this few minutes of video for me in between the blackouts, in between the long trips to Europe and back to speak at the conferences like this, in between long and exhausting events and I'm really very grateful. And I want us to stay and hold on to that bravery that Vladimir was mentioning for a second. I will definitely come back to that. But where I want to start now is actually on the opposite maybe side of a spectrum from bravery and I want to start with a hatred. It was just last week then the Polish magazine Wutegodnik, which has a Ukrainian section now and a wonderful Ukrainian editor, published an important issue and the issue on hatred. And among other contributors there are two Ukrainian writers who wrote their essay, a writer Tanya Malachuk and an artist and curator of our event today, Lya Dosliva. I didn't know what hatred meant before February 24 wrote Tanya. Hatred is a comatose rage. It's a volcano without a crater. It's a darkness that burns. Lya wrote, I think sooner or later we will have to discuss what this hatred is and who is it against. Where it starts, where it ends, but this discussion can only happen on one condition. It should happen within Ukrainian society when it has time, resources and need for it. It should happen by our rules in our words and for us. Just a few days ago when the blackouts covered most of Ukrainian cities after yet another Russian missile hit the critical infrastructure, Swiss Street Magazine asked me to write a short article for their Christmas issue. Something about the war but not too heavy, please. It's Christmas after all. I wrote them a Christmas fairy tale about people who in the dark in cold kitchen collect the seeds from pumpkin. They clean them, they dry them, and in the spring they want to sow them. And if they do it, they believe that spring will definitely come. I also wrote about mothers who do homework assignment with their little daughters in the dark and cold bedrooms under several blankets. And there are fairy tales about the country of people of light that was attacked by cruel enemy. And people fight the darkness. They struggle and collect their little remaining lights. And by this the country becomes light again and the enemy becomes blind and dies. I didn't make the fairy tale completely up. These two stories are from real people and there are of course many more stories, especially now. There are so many brave people that in one way or another collect light to help and care for each other. There's so much love now that sometimes it's impossible to even talk about it without tears. I cannot agree more with both Tanya and Leah. We didn't really know meaning of a lot of things and actions and feelings before February 24. And yes, sooner or later we need to deal with this knowledge to what's happening to us right now with both hatred and love, which is here with us at the same time. They burn us and they heal us and we need to deal with them on our terms with our words facing the challenges of simultaneity of these and other challenges as well. I just believe that it should happen rather sooner than later or it's actually happening right now and every day and every next day. As Katerina Yakovlenko just said in the video that you saw, our future has already started on February 24 and we should not postpone anything. We should act right now. It was precisely with this thought that the future is actually already happening that I invited all these wonderful people to speak and share their thoughts with us because I also believe that the only way to tackle this future is to think and act together. But what does it mean to have the future which already started? Does this mean there is no future ahead? Or does this mean that there is just no more future which is away from us which is decided for us which is alienated or somehow unreachable? It certainly also means that there is no more luxury of postponement of putting things away to a better times. There is not much space of prioritizing this one task over another. The scope of rebuilding and regrowing society during and after the war is enormous yet nothing and no one can be left aside. That is one goal of our gathering here to try and think together of how to regrow, to replenish, to refill cultural networks in Ukraine and not let it be postponed under other emergencies and emergencies everywhere else. This question is based on another more fundamental question of what kind of society do we want to live in? What kind of society do we want to be? When I was asking this question to my colleagues that you have just seen on the screen I was not really expecting such a synchronicity of thinking between them but also with my own thoughts. But then why not? The intensity and urgency of all our joint thinking and writing and talking about our country and our society and our culture in times of war created such a rich humus of ideas and understanding linked us all in a way of resomatic cultural miscellium where everything and everyone is connected. So how should we think about rebuilding Ukrainian culture where all cultural communities in and outside of a country have a place to be? Out of the thoughts and ideas of my colleagues and my own I came up with six points that I want to share with you today. There are vision, inclusion, civil society, culture, education and yes bravery. And I will start with vision as many colleagues said there on the screen we need to start trusting and knowledge and experience we already have. Have our own vision, our own perspective. Leave the imitation imperative that for years was dictating social and cultural life to fit into certain golden standard of democracy, governing and institutions that already exist elsewhere. That let us perceive ourselves as underdeveloped constantly lacking something, constantly needing a wiser and more experienced future. This does not mean we should stop learning from others or that we already know everything better. No, but rather to value the knowledge that Ukrainian society already has and is strongly building every day now. What Ukrainian actors, cultural actors started after 2014 was a process of emancipation and reclaiming their own culture as a way of comprehending the reality here and now as a dream of a different possible futures that was a process of decolonizing as appropriating the ways of thinking, articulating and imagining the reality. I just want us to try and remember a few things from the past years about all the extensive networking across the country that were booming after 2014 about people reaching to each other and doing things together in very different parts of the country which was kind of not really imaginable before or it didn't happen before. I want us to remember the historical or archival turn in the arts and how many artists and different disciplines turned to think and deal with the gaps and white pages of history. About the fact that we managed to collectively discuss, work on and produce a strategy a long time ago it was called Culture 2025 and paradoxically it's still quite viable and relevant today and maybe unfortunate because many things were not done but they're still there. Let's think about the collectives and hubs and platforms that for years were and are a very important part of the cultural ecosystem in Ukraine and we use to perceive it as a sign of institutional weakness. We don't have a proper institution for the supply of collectives and hubs but now this year actually it's the collectives that are at the global focus point with Documenta 15 for example. We need to see how strongly after February 24 Ukrainian artists and cultural actors resist the imposed pacification and the force reconciliation by reclaiming the power of art to bear witness, to retain reality, to be present. How cultural institutions reinvent themselves daily working as communal hubs as daycare facilities at educational platforms, discussion spaces, shelters, charging stations, tea rooms, tell me what else everything you can imagine. Which brings me to our second point which is inclusivity. The war in its cruel way covers vulnerabilities because everyone is vulnerable and everybody is at risk. One side of this is emotion is enormous generosity and support that we see everywhere these days but on the other side it amplifies differences and supports the competition of pains and losses. Ukrainian cultural community as Ukrainian society in general should be built and rebuilt on the richness of inclusivity of backgrounds, knowledges, experiences of everyone. For us actually unity in diversity is not a theory or a set of nice words we know precisely how it feels and work in all our maidans and now during the more than nine months of a full fledged war. The inclusivity should embrace not only all the minorities living in the country but also Ukrainian diaspora which grew quite significantly since the beginning of the war. This diaspora not only constantly supports Ukraine in hard times but it's a present, a very strong present of a strong Ukrainian voices in various countries in different parts of the world. And here I can think of the fact that maybe we can learn or connect to for example black African diasporas that used to play and play today really a crucial role in reimagining and rethinking and reviving the continent and its various countries and communities. Which brings me to the next point which is civil society. One of the symbols of this war will undoubtedly be a struggle for the Dovzhenko Center in Kiev and I know there will be talk about it later on and we have Olenna Honjero here with us which is fantastic. However, it started long before the war. First with Ukrainian Cultural Fund, when with Mstetskets and now with Ukrainian Institute and some of these battles were lost and some were won and some are enveloping. But why was it so important and why I believe we need to bring it back to the focus of our attention now? Because one of the main victories of Maidan was bringing decision making and policy making into the hands of a cultural community. Transparent decision making, fair and balanced public funding, comprehensive policy creation, far from being perfect but still unimaginable before 2014. Transparent decision making allowed a generation of engaged and experienced professionals to step in the key institutions and literally turn them around or create them from scratch. Public funding gave an unprecedented push to astonishing number of cultural project initiatives and new institutions everywhere in the country. When it started to crumble, everyone in the network felt it because it's not only about the big institutions it is about enabling the growth and sustaining and caring about the whole ecosystem of a civil society. And civil society is a network of strong actors that become stronger only by supporting each other, both individuals but especially in Ukrainian case, institutions as carriers and the bondaments of cultural memory. The strength and resilience of cultural alliances, networks and institutions in Ukraine is a sign of resilience of our society. What happens if we lose it, we can't see unfortunately here in Poland, for example, where cultural institutions are going through the tremendous crisis of leadership and trust. But what we also see and feel all these long months of war is immense support from so many international partners, again here in Poland are so, so many. These networks, they empower and amplify Ukrainian voices, they carry them where they would not be otherwise. And it's I think at most importance that we cherish and grow further those partnerships and networks. All these questions and thoughts that I just ask, I think make sense only against the background of one key question, which makes my fourth point. How do we see culture? Do we go back to the discussions from the previous years, especially right after the beginning of annexation and war in 2014? What culture? Why culture? Where in war now? If we as a society make a list of important things, where would culture stand today? What is more important? Funding the army or funding a museum? Donating to food and water supplies or to a book? Rebuilt a hospital or rebuilt a library? But I want to believe that we all know this answer now and we know it not from some theory but from our own daily practice because every day we donate money to the army. We donate money to support friends and colleagues and complete strangers that fight. We donate money to the vulnerable. We donate money to the art emergency funds. We donate money for the generators for public spaces and for books and for museums. I was actually fascinated with the case of the fundraising campaign on the translation of a book on Holodomor, the two Ukrainian journalist Aleksandr Zinchenko and Vakhtanki Piani created literally a few days ago. They needed 100,000 Hryvna. They got 150,000 in a few hours just like that. This is happening because the war and the clearly stated arguments behind this war in its own cruel way crystallized the simple fact that culture is, as was said today, the basis of our society. It holds the memory, the thinking, the knowledge and the constant inquiry into the constantly changing identity. Moreover, it has a liberatory utopian power. The power to imagine and reimagine the future that belongs to this particular society. This liberatory imaginative utopian germinating power of culture should not be forgotten or not taken over by the attempts to justify funding and support for culture either as a part of a creative economy or as a promoter of a peace and understanding. Of course culture and peace can generate job and income. It can contribute to understanding, cohesion and peace, but it's not what's important about it. It is how we are and why we are here still fighting. It's good to imagine that both visionaries and professionals are being born like that but it actually never is. Moreover, true visionaries can only be professionals with deep knowledge and understanding of what and how the culture is. If there was one part of cultural field that suffered significantly from the war, it is cultural education which is the fifth point which was also mentioned today. It also was the part that always constituted rather a problem even before the war. Cultural and artistic education mostly relied on informal, temporary networks of peer learning, on short term workshops, training courses or programs that were brought rather than the Ukrainian cultural educational institutions. The challenge to restart or basically to reinvent education for cultural professionals in Ukraine is huge. But what we have now and didn't have before, at least not to this extent is a very vast network of excellent professionals that are getting both education and experience in European and North American academia, art school and various natural institutions. And most of them, if not all, are very deeply connected, very deeply engaged with the Ukrainian cause and they certainly will be even more if there are possibilities to engage them. The last but not the least all of this and many, many more things that need to be done are absolutely impossible without bravery. Bravery of thinking, bravery of acting, bravery of imagination, bravery of culture is one great Ukrainian contemporary philosopher just said. We need to be brave to deal with radical contemporaneity that is happening to us right now. When all the challenges are happening here, now at the same time, then we need to deal we must deal with everything, everywhere, all at once. And nothing can be postponed, nothing can be delayed into the future because the future is happening with us right now. And by returning culture, it's utopian and visionary potential by rejecting imitation, rejecting forced and compulsory reconciliation we are reconnecting, we're retiring culture to our own society. This is a real and crucial decolonization to think and imagine to be and to act from where you are and where you want to be. Then it will not be important at all where the grass is greener because it's us that plant it we care for it, we water it during the war after the war and ultimately for the war never to happen again. Thank you.