As for now, it is quiet / Станом на зараз — тихо

How did the soundscapes of Ukrainian cities change with the beginning of a full-scale invasion? How did our perception of sound transform by calibration and tuning our sound perception towards the navigating danger and relatively safe spaces? What is “silence” now? Which sounds bring us back to traumatic experiences, in contrast, which have a power to transfer us to the places that we love and miss, that give us the sense of peace and security? 

These questions we have asked upon ourselves in the autumn of 2022, during the development of the project called “Listen Live”, which was part of the artistic research lab on war experiences “Land to Return, Land to Care”. Then, five Ukrainian artists, Ivan Skoryna, Kseniia Yanus, Maksym Ivanov, Victor Konstiantinov and Kseniia Shcherbakova used streamboxes, small boxes that broadcast live sound, to explore one’s sound experiences of displacement, life in their hometowns, volunteering, and memories of the first months of the full-scale invasion. Thus, the sound broadcast became a tool for overcoming feelings of alienation and isolation, and the project documentation preserved the sound texture of everyday life during the war. 

The project archive will be presented in the space of the Home of Sound together with the listening room — a space, where the broadcasts from different parts of Ukraine are to be featured. During the summertime, visitors will have the chance to experience the listening room in person or visit the project’s website to listen to the broadcasts online. 

Reflecting on the process of long-term sound transmission, the curatorial group leans on the term of “labor of witnessing”, proposed by the researchers and theorists Svitlana Matviyenko and Asia Bazdyrieva. This term explains the situation in which Ukrainian society had to refocus on collective documentation and witnessing the experience of war. This relates to both artistic and journalistic projects, as well as the experiences of every person who witnesses the air alarms, shellings, loses on the level of conscious and unconscious perception and the body, encrypting the marks of such shocks. 

To refuse to be a witness is uneasy (or even impossible?), moreover, to be a witness is a necessity. We have to watch to remember. And to put it precisely in line with our initiative, to listen to remember, as sound becomes a way to explore something hidden from one’s eyes. 

We invite streamers to observe their sound experiences from a personal and rather intimate position, documenting personal reactions connected to such experiences. At the same time, we encourage collective work through the simultaneous transmission of sounds in the Home of Sound space. Artist and researcher Olya Zirkata uses the term “warbound” to explain the concept of a collective survival and witnessing, in which humans and other species are gathered by shared fragility, and shared trembling. Simultaneous layering of experiences from people of various backgrounds and different parts of Ukraine, in our opinion, is a key activity of the exhibition. We aim to create a space where, thanks to live broadcasts, we can be together, visit each other in Kharkiv, Dnipro, Kyiv, Odesa, Lviv, in small towns and villages of Ukraine, closer to the front line.  

There are spaces that are overwhelmingly difficult and painful to enter. These are the places of the rupture and intersection of similar yet distinct experiences of war. Our project is nowhere near healing these ruptures, but for three months the Home of Sound will become a platform of gathering broadcasts of different sound experiences. We leave the degree of openness or anonymity to the discretion of the artists, but the streambox is a device with highly sensitive microphones, and is an overly attentive observer. This small black box captures not only the surrounding landscape or the sound world of an enclosed space, it also captures the streamer’s body in space, movements, and words. 

The city sound layering, as well as the layering of the landscapes and private spaces will encounter the listeners in the exhibition hall of the Home of sound or during the online-listening. These sounds are aimed to become a mirroring of the process that we are living in for the longest time. This is the situation of being in lots of different places at the same time. As well as the living of those phantasms that are generated in the places where our ideas of then and now, of there and here, are teared up  and glued together. 

“As for now, it is quiet”. This phrase, that later became the title of an exhibition, is brought from the telegram channels’ notifications. As for now, it is quiet, there is no shelling. But this note also gives us the sense of temporary exhalation, compression, being in relative safety, but at the same time anxious anticipation. As well as in the wishes to “have a quiet night”, “have a quiet day”, “oh, let it be quiet, just be quiet”, with which we try to make amends with the reality and the exhibition space, although we understand that any sound events can take place in it.

Nevertheless, we want to create a space of observation and immersion. This mood is conveyed by the scenography of the listening room created by Dasha Chechushkova. In a dialogue with the neo-Gothic building of Lviv Radio, the artist imitates the temple structure, creating drawings on the glass and inhabiting the space with transformed creatures, like medieval illustrations, focusing on our own changes and transformations during the war. 

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/1/ Land of Return, Land of Care is an artistic research laboratory on war experiences. The project curators are Natalka Revko, Oksana Dovgopolova, and Kateryna Semenyuk. The project was implemented in collaboration with several organizations — the Odesa Museum of Modern Art, Cultural memory platform Past / Future / Art, and the NGO Slushni Rechi. The development of the “Listen Live” project was supported by Soundcamp and Acoustic Commons. 

/2/  “The Labor of Witnessing”. Asia Bazdyrieva, Dariia Kuzmych, Yarema Malashchuk, and Svitlana Matviyenko, 2022.

/3/  Zikrata, Olya. “Warbound: Collective Audio Streaming from Ukraine,” Journal of Sonic Studies, 2025