Y. and I take a long walk early on Sunday afternoon. He can now leave Ukraine for a strict number of days, and so we meet in Berlin. We speak for hours, rushing to talk about everything at once — including surrealism this time, for obvious reasons.

His recent assignment included a long ride in the evacuation train from Ukraine's eastern region, carrying heavily wounded men. The seven hours of the journey felt unbearably long, still and depressing, he tells me, the hardest experience in documenting the war so far. It is the opposite of how it feels on the frontline where, however dangerous it is, one still retains a capacity to act, indeed, it becomes very clear what one has to do. Here, the stillness overpowers, with its literal embodiment of people with severed limbs, on artificial respiration, or enduring the kind of pain that is incompatible with speech.

What he saw, while peering into this acute reality, is the profound, irreversible disruption of life, of the possibility that was preemptively erased, of bodies and lands carrying the inscription of loss and devastation in them.

I keep coming back to that point in time. The visceral intensity of the first moments of the attack felt like a sudden estrangement of names and meanings from their objects.

Within a total rupture of reality as I knew it, I learned that my body was capable of mobilising and restructuring its resources, as well its sensorial apparatus — switching off some of the perceptions and enhancing others. Never in my life had I experienced such extraordinary clarity in thought and action. My body was fully attuned to the audiovisual landscape of the war, ready to process every piece of information, all of which was new.

Only a few days later, when I noticed that music — any music — sounded like broken glass, did I realise that the level of adrenaline in my body all these days had breached all limits, so as to have altered my capacity for perception, redirecting my attention to what was crucial to surviving: the rest was just noise. I did not feel hunger, nor the textures of the surfaces that I touched, nor pain. For two weeks I had no memory of my past life — past and future simply did not exist as concepts.

Writer, Naomi Klein, calls it ‘a state of shock’.

She writes:

“a state of shock is what happens to us — individually or as a society — when we experience a sudden and unprecedented event for which we do not have an adequate explanation. At its essence, a shock is the gap that opens up between an event and existing narratives to explain that event… Being creatures of narratives, humans tend to be very uncomfortable with meaning-vacuum...”¹

Yet I keep coming back to this moment, articulating it, at first, through a negation: it is critical to say what this gap is not.

I am, too, dwelling on the gap, but I am resistant to the logic that is inflicted upon us (that is, the differentiated us, in differentiated locations), which puts the complex environment of the rupture at risk of being theorized in a disquietingly unburdened way. The rhetoric of shock and discomfort is a byproduct of the 20th century inter- and postwar discourse on psyche and trauma, which, in its widespread application today, is infantilising and depoliticising. It is a distancing device, just like the performance of empathy.

This gap that opens up, through the rupture of reality, is constructed of multiple de-automated experiences, interlinking sonic, corporeal, and digital across matter and field. It is atmospheric: it contains, envelopes, and pressures. The flattening of this gap obscures its interior, while reproducing the imagination of some kind of normalcy — from which some of us are temporarily or permanently excluded.

Here I want to attend to the atmospheric aspects of the war, thinking further with Olexii about ‘the state of war,’ meaning “state in the sense that physicists or chemists think about states of matter.”²

She writes:

"Geo in “geopolitics” and “geography” has regained its literal meaning. In Greek, geo is the earth. Nowadays in Ukraine there is nothing more unstable than the territory, but at the same time nothing more tangible than the earth. Geosomatic community. The war in Ukraine is geosomatocide: the destruction of bodies, the devastation of the earth, and a nuclear threat hanging over Europe. Military aggression as a response to what might have happened seeps into bodies along with air and water, grows into green zones, leaves residential areas in ruins, and takes hundreds of lives daily. Recall the quote from Jairus Grove: “By state of war I mean state in the sense that physicists or chemists think about states of matter.” The perverse epistemic software of the capitalist West and of Putin’s extractivist patriarchal regime cannot register the magnitude of the losses taking place: the earth, whose abstraction is territory, and bodies, whose abstraction is population numbers."

Bio

Asia Bazdyrieva is a scholar and writer with a background in art history and analytical chemistry.Her main interest is in the relationship between natural sciences and their seemingly neutral techniques, and the production of imaginaries that span social strata, while shaping politics and poetics of the earth. In 2018-2022, she co-authored ‘Geocinema’ — a collaborative project exploring the infrastructures for earth observation as co-producing forms of cinema. Bazdyrieva was a Fulbright scholar in 2015-2017 at The City University of New York, and Digital Earth fellow in 2018-2019; she was also a research fellow at the Bauhaus University Weimar. She is currently pursuing her PhD at The University of Applied Arts Vienna, and serves as an advisor in the Advisory Board of the transmediale festival in Berlin.