Listening to the sounds of war
(2025)
author(s): Razumeiko Illia
published in: Research Catalogue
The project intertwines personal memory, sound studies, and artistic practice to explore how war transforms both landscape and perception. Beginning with the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the author reflects on the Dnipro River as a literal and symbolic frontline, where silence and explosions shape the sonic environment. Through the creation of operas such as Chornobyldorf, Genesis, and GAIA-24, in cooperation with composer Roman Grygoriv and artistic collective Opera Aperta author investigates how art can transmute trauma into collective listening and ecological reflection. The text ultimately proposes sound and water as metaphors for resilience and continuity—liquid archives that carry both the memory of destruction and the possibility of regeneration.
Warbound: Collective Audio Streaming from Ukraine
(2025)
author(s): Olya Zikrata
published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
Russia’s war of aggression is a multidimensional process of conquest that expands its time and space through sound. As Russian forces continue their advance into Ukraine, seizing Ukrainian territories both “horizontally” and “vertically,” as warfare scholar Svitlana Matviyenko (2024) has argued, Ukrainians across the country find themselves living in the sonic expanse of Russian assault. This research paper refers to this experience as one of warbound, of a (sonically) lived relation to war. To explore this relation and situated relationality it may entail, I turn to the work of Ukrainian sound artists and practitioners who participated in collective audio streaming, seeking to recast the Ukrainian testimony of the Russian invasion as a contingent truth claim. The paper examines the 2022 iteration of the audio stream project Listen Live, constitutive to the Land To Return, Land To Care research-creation laboratory. The project is studied in the scope of its testimonial reach and activist pursuit, as well as its humanist and posthumanist performativity.