Authors

Discussion

This paper is a soiling practice, a practice of mazal’nysti, women in the south of Ukraine who built houses out of clay, painted them blue, and used to go out fishing in the sea. My practice exists between soiling one’s hands and making birds, storytelling in critical-creative forms, researching genealogies of women artists, and making images. By bringing these different elements in conversation, I examine what it means to be telling stories about a place that was shaped by waves of imperial violence and continues to be on the line of fire and under the silt of the Kakhovka disaster. By demonstrating examples of my multimodal practice (writing, video, making), I argue that the contexts of slow and immediate violence, which leave erasures and silences in their wake, require different and diverse modes of engagement.