Olya Zikrata: TO WHOM IT MAY SPEAK: Scenes of Ukrainian truth, and terror

This audio paper narrates through the experiences and ambiences of Russian aggression to which Ukrainians relate a long history of Russia’s imperial statehood. (Plokhy, 2023) It seeks a space of ethics in which sound expresses and gives testimonial to Ukrainian tragedy. In February 2023, Ukrainian art historian Kateryna Iakovlenko wrote an essay in which she claimed a justice-seeking quality to “cruel”, and “poor”, images, contesting a particular labeling of the images as “sensitive content”. (Iakovlenko, 2023) The audio paper resonates with Iakovlenko’s discussion, seeking a similar quality in “cruel”, and “poor”, sounds which were recorded hastily to make the war traceable in the experience of its victims. These sounds are not to be assessed for value-producing acoustics but fathomed in the actuality of ruination. 

I take ruination as a sonic state and worldly entanglement, mobilizing it as a force against which powers of resistance are measured. The audio paper invests in the exploration of Ukrainian resistance, locating in the world-ruining times a sonority of the Ukrainian desire to live and Russia’s genocidal intent to end Ukrainian living. 

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The audio-paper is part of Seismograf's Open Call What Sounds Do – New Directions in an Anthropology of Sound (2023)