Continuing the Conversation with Those Who Ask About the War

"The ability to maintain a relationship and talk about your experience with someone else is very important. And this goes against one of the intentions of genocide, which is to destroy social fabric," says Beatrice Patsalides Hofmann, a psychoanalyst and staff psychologist at the Primo Levi Centre in Paris, in a dialogue with cultural journalist Daria Badior. The need to speak, listen, and hear each other reflects the motivation of many projects that have been documenting the war through interviews since the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion. The book Conversations with Those Who Ask About the War is dedicated to these initiatives.

The interviews that form the basis of the collection document the reality of recording and preserving oral testimonies of the war as of the summer of 2023. Since then, the projects and initiatives mentioned in the book have taken different trajectories: some continue to collect testimonies, some have become part of the corpus of sources about the war, the basis for academic or artistic reflections, and some are currently closed for various reasons. Thus, the collection illustrates solutions, problems, and issues in the field of documentation that can now be revisited in a different time and circumstance.

We would like to continue the conversation around the topics that we have begun to address in the book. We invite you to a meeting with sociologist Inga Kozlova, historian Liana Blicharska and cultural manager Yevheniia Nesterovych, during which we will talk about what has been done and what should be done differently, what are the consequences of documenting oral testimonies, and how to complete projects in the context of the ongoing war. We will again ask ourselves and others the question "what's next?" and hope to at least dot the map of the way forward.

The event will be part of the Center's public program "Source as a Choice," organized by the Center for Urban History in cooperation with EHRI. During the meetings, researchers will share their work with various sources on war and mass violence in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The choice to create and preserve sources can be one of the tools for embodying this violence or, on the contrary, for opposing it. Our choice to talk about these events through the prism of certain sources creates a field in which the complex past will live on in the present and future.

Credits

Cover Image: a photo from the presentation of the Conversations with Those Who Ask About the War book during the symposium "The Most Documented War: Ethics and Practice of International Collaborations", 3.6.2024, Lviv / Bohdan Yemets

Gallery: Olya Klumyk