 Hello everyone, so hello again. My name is my name is as a buzz diva. I'm a scholar and writer from Ukraine and first of all I would like to thank mega in Simon for making this event happen and for me Yes for me Especially over the past year ever since the big war started, but then much more years since it started in 2014 the war in Ukraine for me Often it's very difficult to speak also because Even though I speak a lot and I write a lot, but the difficult that that it is difficult because often times In the times such as now the war I have to speak often not as an Individual but as someone who is seen as someone who has to speak for an entire land and it's a very Exhausting process, but then also finding myself in the situation where I have to kind of be both You know I have to show both the the suffer and the struggle But then also not to be too negative and propose some solutions for how these things can be Changed and it's difficult to be in this position But today when I was hearing other presenters speak and thank you so much for amazing presentations it gave me also motivation to continue to Speak and to write and I'm very grateful for that and today in my very short contribution So I was invited or my prompt was to speak about creativity and environmentalism in the context of the war and I want to use that or I want to start with an antagonism in a way and To see antagonism as a kind of productive method to address the topics that we are talking about today and I want to begin with kind of a little Memory of me being in Columbia University. Just visiting for a lecture in 2017 and then I've heard the lecture from Eva Domanska who is a Polish scholar who is also kind of partially teaching at Stanford and her lecture was about the shift in humanities that occurred kind of the shift between the post-war Discurses in humanities and the current discurses in Western humanities And so she was talking about how after the Second World War much of the conversations were about trauma and about Kind of the state like the humanity as such and also the loss the pain And everything that the Second World War Brought about and then she said that over the past 20 years There is a significant shift about like even how people are talking about what is important And she said that there is much more conversation about kind of recreation solidarity, but then often in in the way that kind of we want to think about kind of healing and and and how The conversations are shaped around building different types of relationships and futures So overall she pointed at the fact that as opposed to the post-war conversations about kind of pain and trauma and wounds and Mutilated landscapes and bodies the conversations are now became more positive in a sense and people want to speak about positive things And for me that was also really interesting something that I started to think about Because again like many of us come from sides of struggle right and For me as someone who is from Ukraine and oftentimes in Western countries I see this huge gap between the places that are subjected to violence and You know, you cannot be always positive and creative while also fighting And and then I find myself in other places that want to speak only in positive and creative terms and This is also something that I find particular in the current moment when Ukraine is at war which is devastating for bodies and lands and And already now when Ukraine is at this place We hear often conversations or like questions about how we can Rebuild Ukraine how we can be creative about the land what kind of solutions we can propose and for me again, the I feel I feel the struggle in this kind of very different approaches to The actual processes of erasure that are happening in Ukraine and then already in this moment when we are fighting There are these ideas of like oh how we how we can how we can move past what is happening to the land as as we speak and My friend that it's in Balook. She wrote that imperialism operates through erasure that takes multiple forms, right? Erasure of lands archives voices Things that are happening and that we might not even know about just because they're not visible various forms of violences and When I hear conversations about how to rebuild trick-and-strike start from the scratch propose new creative solutions I often feel like it's happening too fast in the sense that an actual struggle is happening and the actual things that were never seen Named They are already kind of in the past while new creative solutions come and my work in my work I Focus on infrastructures deliberately Because I I mean in my work I'm looking at how Ukraine is turned into a resource like the kind of the image of Ukraine as the breadbasket and for me Looking at infrastructures as forms of media that we can read and look at to understand Fast and slow violences Is very productive because it allows me to see how these violences are work-created and how they are being Perpetuated and for me, it's also interesting that now when Ukraine is at war and under a massive destruction in in Europe there are already like different Proposed creative solutions how to reconstruct Ukraine and this proposed solutions They actually keep negating the the subjectivities that are very vocal and has been very vocal in Ukraine and instead There are this kind of bigger and greater idea how to make Ukraine because Many political projects currently are Kind of excited about this new opportunity to create something new in the place of a struggle and I think for me Kind of what I find the the antagonism that I find productive is to see that maybe these new creative solutions like are happening too fast and instead we have to We have to take time and to actually stay in this place where we are not Trying to run away from the damage that has been done, but look into that damage and to to actually learn from it and to understand how to What is it that was neglected for many decades? What is it that was a missing knowledge? especially about Russian imperialism so what this damage can what we can learn from it how we can read it and I think this is this this is my kind of the proposition to think about something and to spend some time Without creative solutions, but rather to be numb and in pain and kind of Understand what this Pain is about and it's not and I wrote a year ago that My work is and will never be about trauma and they and I meant it in a way that Especially after the Second World War The trauma the discourse of trauma was eventually I think kind of unproductively instrumentalized in order not to To kind of to see the problem in the subject who is suffering To see the problem like this body is something that is kind of almost Pathologized something that carries the damage and so instead of looking at Something at land or a body that is being traumatized We can also Instead look at the systems that created this damage in the first place And so I think my proposition is to kind of stay with this Damage but not from a pathologizing perspective, but rather through how and what this damage Is telling us about this low and fast violences and they wanted to Respond to or like add a little comments to a brilliant talk that Anuradha did just before because she was referring to Paul Salan's work about his poetry after Auschwitz that the poetry is not possible after Auschwitz and and of course we need poetic work to kind of Process and work through and narrate various forms of injustices and also in this way to kind of Demand historical justice, but this moment of when words Cannot work or poetry is not possible these moments come in the moments of Kind of ultimate brutality and we experienced that last year in Ukraine. There were particular days weeks and months Especially when we witnessed kind of the the scale of the genocide and the torture And this was the moment when you cannot speak because writing is bleeding and You you really cannot say and this is something that we saw last October was Israel and Palestine kind of this numbing moment when you cannot when you think that words are really unnecessary And are not capable of changing anything But I think what is important for all of us is to dwell on this moments of impossibility to speak Instead of speaking right away or finding words right away and to to stay in that moment and not be very fast in our propositions Also because again Kind of the it's also the form of how erasure works. It proposes you to kind of like move Away from from the damage and so and also imperialism kind of takes away our time To say what we want to say. So I think my proposition is to stay for a while with this damage So then we can actually attend to it and and find proper words. Thank you so much