Warbound: Collective Audio Streaming From Ukraine
Olya Zikrata
I would like to thank Natalka Revko for sharing her insights with me,
together we are – разом ми є.
Introduction
Each war is more than one. It is never limited to a single dimension of violence. The multiple it becomes is vast and devastating, engulfing and eroding. It spills across the battle fields — territory, environment, body, senses, information — making assault operational in excess. This text is about the Ukrainian experience of Russia’s pervasive assault as shaped by sonic encounter, among other modes of violent inscription. It is about the experience of invasion that cannot be defined by visual cartography of occupation but must be fathomed in its expanse: the multiple that “spreads its span” in the Serresian sense of the word (Serres 1995: 59), its terror, in a sustained acoustic envelopment that I refer to here as inhabited warbound.
Warbound, as a way of being-with-war in its acoustically forged territory, echoes philosopher Bruno Latour’s (2017) concept of “earthbound” — a politics of place-making invested in entanglements, relationalities, and collective survival. To become warbound is to be gathered in shared fragility and trembling, not only in the sense of the vibrational continuum of war that Steve Goodman (2010) explores in his book Sonic Warfare but also in the sense of a reterritorialized discontinuum of peacetime that warbound entails, both in its relational nexus and ecological condition. Warboundness is thus profoundly affirmative, for it situates one within the space of war that rematerializes one’s existence, revealing the depths of the world’s “indivisible volume” – to use Salomé Voegelin’s terms (Voegelin 2019: 60) – sonic wartime and sonic wartime-earth as a commonly lived bound.
To live in Ukraine after 24 February 2022 is to be entrenched in what has become a place of war, to be held not just by a territory as space bounded by a border but by “one’s situation on a given soil,” in Latour’s (2022) understanding of it, a new kind of ground defined by an “ordeal.” For the world, the Ukrainian ordeal is a capital-centric concern, a situation of yet another “conflict” through which powers and resources are being measured; for Ukraine, its ordeal is a set of new bounds around which to contend with what it, Ukraine as earth-centered multispecies community, can do and how it must survive. Warboundness in this context is multi-situational, and my focus on sound as materiality of war and a condition of invasion marks the specificity of a situation. The sonicbound is one of “acoustic territory” (LaBelle 2010), a soundway by which war acts, marks (scars), and ruptures (transforms) the background, leaving a material trace of its invisible trajectory, a trace as a lingering presence by means of which one can make claim to truth— and a certain (uncertain) truthfulness.
What does it mean to claim the truths of war in a state of sonic contingency? To establish warbound as a site of knowing? To implicate sitedness for the sake of evidential integrity of “material emanations” (Schulze 2018: 112) from all there is — war? I turn to these questions through the examination of the creative work of Ukrainian sound artists and practitioners within the scope of the project Nazhyvo (Listen Live), with its experiential, sonico-political, and justice-seeking implications.My intention is to give the project the attention it deserves, rethinking its collective effort toward a sonically structured and technologically supported understanding of wartime experiences, a shared registering of war in sonic and sensory conditions, and in the contingencies of “material witnessing” (Schuppli 2020).
Nazhyvo is a series of real-time audio streams transmitted from Ukraine, just as it is a set of recordings of these streams that now serve as a media-specific memory archive of the war experience. In its technological undertaking, the project must be understood within and beyond the empirical givenness of transmitted sounds by which it crafts the act of (ear-)witnessing and renders “listen live” as witness live. While it makes listening its “referent” – a term I borrow from sound theorist Anette Vandsø’s (2017) discussion of event-specific recordings, in commemorative contexts, that seek affordances offered by a more-than-human “technological ear”– the technological construction of the listening act is not its sole focus. Nazhyvo is a collective Ukrainian project that has emerged from artist-led war study workshops, developing into a form of acoustemological commitment shaped by ongoing knowledge-making.
What follows is a study of this commitment, explored within the overarching pursuit of truth-claiming. I begin with a section providing context for the collective experience of the Russian invasion as an invasion through sound, among other ways. I touch on the colonial intent and coercive tactics of the aggressor, drawing out an understanding of shared war as a lived expanse that is thoroughly performative. The war, in my thinking of it, unfolds in the specificities of oppressive operations, in the material details of aggression that do not necessarily conform to a strict taxonomic order – of this or that – but instead manifest as a complexity that makes warbound a lived space. Nazhyvo is introduced within the ecology of relations emerging in this space and situated within the bounded sound of wartime.
I then proceed to a closer discussion of the project, seeking in its modes of inquiry both humanist and posthumanist renderings of truth-telling. This discussion draws upon the theoretical insights of Salomé Voegelin, Steven Feld, and Susan Schuppli as well as the ethnographic vocabulary of J. Martin Daughtry while also engaging with Ukrainian awareness of collectively developed sonic intelligence, the shared knowledge of being-with-war. As I delve deeper into acoustic knowings and the political potentials they harness, and as I map the project as a material witnessing practice, I call for a new experiential truth of Ukrainian justice-seeking efforts committed to sonic relationality and to an ethics that extends from this relationality.
The Collectivity of a Shared War
Ukrainians live in “belliphonic” times,[1] times of blunt violence and the shared contingency of Russian aggression experienced by the entire population. War tears through the air, sparing no living being as it seeks to claim all. Survival becomes a ruthless game of chance, a Russian roulette that is no longer a figure of speech but a grim reality played out through Russian missiles, aerial bombs, Shahed kamikaze drones, and other weapons of destruction targeting Ukrainian lives. Danger does not always lurk within the seen but persists in the unseen, in the material conditions of its sonic propagation. Ukrainians find themselves ensnared in dramatized displays of colonial aggression, haunted by the acousmatic presence of an unrelenting predator. For them, war is more than a visually framed battleground; it is a lived actuality of sounded intent, a resonant orchestration of ideological and physical violence — violence aimed at the genocidal erasure of a people.[2]
With the piercing wails of sirens, deafening detonations, and intense shock waves, the acoustic environment transforms into an ecology of predation, where sound enacts the conditions of presence that extend the aggressor’s violent reach. The aggressor asserts dominance through contingent yet continual involvement, traversing the geographical map of active combat and creating a newly bounded space in which war takes on a tangible form in the material reality of its sonic continuum. Such involvement is orchestrated expansively and eventfully. Warnings of attacks come in waves, often several times a day, and are heard across the regions. The barrage of missiles and drones is directed at multiple locations simultaneously to maximize the impact of terror. Ballistic paths are frequently altered in order to disorient the populations and heighten the sense of dread. Life becomes harnessed to the will of the aggressor, whose air assault strategies are deeply entwined with sleep deprivation tactics designed to cause widespread exhaustion and suffering.
Sound in its “potential for violence” (Daughtry 2015: 5) is exploited as a resource to sustain a colonial operation performed through invasive techniques and coercive mechanisms of torture.[3] The Ukrainian experience of torture extends beyond makeshift torture chambers established by Russian authorities across the occupied territories of Ukraine. It encompasses psychological manipulation and physical coercion enacted by occupying forces across lived spaces. Floodwater, for example, became an instrument of torture when hundreds of Ukrainians found themselves “quite literally, undergoing waterboarding” in their own homes after Russia’s intentional detonation of the Nova Kakhovka dam (Matviyenko 2023). Flooded towns were sealed off by the Russian military, which sought to inflict collective harm by weaponizing rising waters.[4] Similarly, sound, too, has been leveraged as an instrument of Russia’s predatory profiteering, enabling the aggressor to harness both space and body within its collective capacity.
In this context, any sound that could signal or perform Russian aggression is understood as a crucial component of an acoustically designed, sonically bolstered, and collectively lived performative environment within which the Russian invasion has been unfolding. This research examines being in the space of this environment, not in the sense of what it holds but how it transforms, shaping the realities of possible worlds in which war is more than a lived belliphonic attack, encompassing also a state of perpetual alert through which Ukrainians must navigate. The “more than” – in relation to what else violence can be – challenges the idea that belliphonic violence is strictly part of the “spectrum” of sounds produced by war or that it can be quantified in view of a particular taxonomy. In his book Listening to War, Daughtry proposes a certain givenness of such a taxonomy, drawing primarily on military and civilian testimonies, written and spoken. For Daughtry, wartime is demarcated from peacetime in an acoustically distinct way: through a qualified range of wartime sounds. What I want to argue is that “listening to war” involves more than just listening to belliphonic sounds within a complex taxonomy of their difference. It is also listening across the possibly impossible ways of registering the invisible as it manifests itself in the temporalities and intensities of the disruption that war becomes and works to be in the fullness of its potential to harm life – both life itself as well as the web of relations it sustains.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began in the spring of 2014, when Russian military forces, known as “green men,” seized Crimea and launched a covert operation in eastern Ukraine, turning the region into a war zone. It later evolved into a full-scale offensive when Russia escalated its attacks on 24 February 2022. Ukrainians were drawn into an existential fight for survival, facing the imminent prospect of death if they failed to defend themselves, their land, and a living multispecies world against genocidal and ecocidal destruction. Survival became a posthuman imperative, necessitating a fight for life that extended beyond the preservation of one’s individual body-self toward a collective body-other. It called for a new status of Ukrainian truth – one reflecting the plurality of the situated knowledges of a more-than-human community, ecologies of beings and things, and diverse ontological entities from which to gather and with which to imagine a heterogeneous Ukrainian testimony.
Everything — from Ukrainian fields disfigured by explosive ordnance, to mutilated bodies of Ukrainian civilians recovered from mass graves, to Ukrainian airspace pierced by combat drones — bears witness to the totality of the crime scene of Russia’s war. The attack on Ukrainian life is lived in the actuality of multiple ruptures that wartime, as a shared timescape, brings about. To live inside the war is to be entangled in worldly transformations where violence as distributed force bears agentive capacity, erupting or acting slowly within the world that it makes itself a part of. It is to be thrust into a continual witnessing act from which there is no withdrawal: Ide zapys (This World Is Recording), as Ukrainian artist Katya Buchatska (2022) has put it in relation to her own being in it.[5] One can neither pause nor rewind it. Recording becomes “this world” folded onto a present continuum.
Witnessing – and the “labor” of being involved in it, as Ukrainian artists and scholars (Bazdyrieva, Kuzmych, Malashchuk, and Matviyenko 2022) assert – is never a choice but an everyday responsibility to respond to a situation in which one is bound by the condition of being-with others. It is an intrinsic positioning from which there is no retreat. Laboring here is not necessarily tied to a self or an individual; it operates transindividually and within the larger field of experience. It reconnects a politics of commitment to an ontological state in which wartime humans and nonhumans live and in which they must survive. One may think of such response and responsiveness through terms used by theoretical physicist and philosopher Karen Barad (2010: 265) — responsibility not as an “obligation” one chooses, but an “incarnate relation” one becomes. War is registered across the lived world of beings and things and their interdependent temporalities. It is evidenced by disruptions performed upon the world whose conditions of (and for) living are dictated by war. The world (as in Buchatska’s Ide zapys) is now a record of these disruptions, a living witness risking being caught in its own recording-as-witnessing. Witnessing that is not just subjective-collective but ecological or emerging through relation. It is performed through different modes, terms, and forms of collective being and becoming, including sonic ones.
The Ukrainian artistic research laboratory Zemlia povernennia, zemlia turboty (Land To Return, Land To Care) – curated by Oksana Dovgopolova, Kateryna Semenyuk, and Natalka Revko – along with its offshoot project Nazhyvo – curated by Natalka Revko, Valeria Nasedkina, and teams from Soundcamp and Acoustic Commons – has emerged as a hub for probing modes of witnessing that, among other things, engage in sonic sensibility and acoustic presence. The laboratory operates at the intersection of Ukrainian art, philosophy, and activism, focusing on projects that engage in collaborative knowledge making in a time of war. It functions as a joint initiative aimed at fostering a deeper understanding of the Ukrainian experience of the Russian invasion through experiential research, curatorial practice, and critical intervention. All the projects carried out so far have invested in the practice of active witnessing and the speculative possibilities it opens, as collective intelligences must be gathered not only from human subjects but also from all that is bound to earthly survival. Inasmuch as Ukrainians testify to what they are living, the land itself becomes a witnessing entity, bearing testimony through its material conditions. Zemlia povernennia, zemlia turboty is committed to embracing this expanded testimonial capacity with which the affected more-than-human world is endowed.
In this context of curatorial framework, Nazhyvo serves as a proposition to explore the act of acoustic testimony and modes of truth-telling it entails. The project directly engages with the experience of the invasion, refraining from solely interpreting it as an encounter with belliphonic violence. Instead, it explores this experience as one of emergent collectivity operating through acoustic relations shaped by new wartime orders. The participating artists seek to redefine wartime acoustics from their own idiosyncratic perspectives, aligned with a collective acoustemological commitment and auditory practice.
The environment that the participants inhabit and that inhabits them holds profound transformations wrought by this war. It testifies to shifts in lived conditions, exposing the scars and ruptures etched into physical and mental spaces. Knowing the war from within it confronts one with terrifying and triggering sounds and silences, while bearing the resonance of vulnerability that they inaugurate. As Nazhyvo unfolds, it compels us to imagine what this resonance might be and how it is enacted. The artists lend a palpable urgency to the shared experience of war, working from acoustic narratives that both encapsulate and transcend individual struggles, fostering a collective stance of resilience, survival, and mutuality. The acoustic environment is approached with attention to detail in encounters and reciprocities by which sonic traces of war are rendered into a contingent testimony – one that emerges only through one’s own being-with it.
Listen Live
Nazhyvo is a project that deepens our understanding of the invasion through the acoustic investigation of wartime. It began as a grassroots initiative pioneering the acoustic exploration of ecological conditions in the Odesa region. With the onset of Russia’s full-scale war, the project shifted its focus to the formation of an acoustic community, embarking on a newly emergent inquiry into wartime life. The curators expanded the scope of the project and its activist stance, seeking a wider geographical frame and greater site-specificity. In its existing iterations, the project engages with ecological knowledges and collective experiences of war, attending closely to the experience of loss as it unfolds across the everyday materialities of life and within the continuity of ecological existence.
The first documented phase of the project included workshop sessions with five artists from across Ukraine who used portable transmitters with open microphones called “streamboxes” to stream the sounds of their locations to an online sound map accessible in real time. An online listening event took place on 5 November 2022, with the support of several external and internal partners. Soundcamp, the UK-based arts cooperative, played a key role in developing and distributing the streamboxes to Ukrainian artists. It was notable for its significant contribution, providing essential creative and technical guidance during the workshops and throughout the event. The UK-based platform Acoustic Commons hosted the working versions of the project, facilitating live audio streaming and documentation.The Ukrainian NGO Slushni Rechi and the Museum of Odesa Modern Art provided curatorial support, while the cultural memory platform Past/Future/Art facilitated the project’s commemorative agenda.
Some of the streams were later archived in their entirety on the Zemlia povernennia, zemlia turboty website, where they were made available for continued exploration. This inaugural phase set a precedent for subsequent iterations of the project, such as the 2023 stream from Odesa, performed by Natalka Revko, and the large-scale 2024 event Stanom na zaraz – tykho (As For Now, It Is Quiet), which featured over twenty performers streaming throughout the summer of 2024 from various locations, including frontline areas.[6] The 2024 event – curated by Natalka Revko, Valeria Nasedkina, and Andrii Linik and supported by the Institute of Contemporary Art, the NGO Slushni Rechi, Soundcamp, and the Ukrainian foundation IZOLYATSIA. Platform for Cultural Initiatives – was presented in two formats: as an installation at Lviv-based cultural center Dim Zvuku (Home of Sound) and as an online Kimnata Slukhannia (Listening Room). The streams were partially archived in the Arkhiv (Archive) and Mixcloud space of Slushni Rechi.
For my inquiry, I will draw from the archived material of the 2022 event to rethink the sonic expanse of the invasion and what it renders fathomable through collective – ecological – emergence. What Nazhyvo proposes through the act of streaming and mapping is more than an acoustic art of commoning and listening together, which the platform Acoustic Commons both supports and politicizes. The stakes are radically higher. The project testifies to the Ukrainian experience of the invasion, contained within its acoustic truths, from which an understanding can be drawn of what the invaded body and the invaded environment might be in the simultaneity and reciprocity of their invisible materiality and in the belliphonics of ecological entanglement.
In her work on sonic possibilism and the entanglement of the world it enacts, Salomé Voegelin develops an argument for a temporal geography of sound in which there are no lines of separation enabled by visual logics. In sonic terms, the world is contingent and formless, yet its “formless form” can be inhabited and fathomed through the invisible depths that hold us together in coexistence with the environment (Voegelin 2021). What we are as a world is not measured by the thickness of skin, or by individuation, but by the possibilities of a porous, inclusive, and expansive becoming – one that is contingently gestured. It is through its political stakes that a geography of our “invisible and indivisible” existences can be probed (Voegelin 2019).
The invisible that Nazhyvo makes audible reveals a reality that resists the taxonomy of belliphonic sounds through which the sonic dimension of war is often sought to be defined. It plunges us into the depths of what can be navigated as a world disrupted by a nontaxonomic aggression. We do not necessarily hear the invasion solely through the belliphonic reach of the sonic space it performs but through the belliphonic becomings it enables. What we detect are ways in which the belliphonic body starts navigating the imminent threat of a military attack, the ways in which it starts acting according to wartime orders: digging trenches, assessing its safety, grappling with exhaustion, listening alertly for the next round of bombardments, dreaming of homecoming from a place of refuge, finding itself on the move, fleeing dangers that threaten it in the lived reality of a war that it must survive.
The five streams produced by Ukrainian artists who joined Nazhyvo from the cities of Kyiv, Dnipro, Odesa, Uzhhorod, and Lviv converge to form a creative inquiry into the concept of the belliphonic body: a collective body emerging at its interbeing – in Voegelin’s application of Thich Nhat Hanh’s term – in its essential relation with the belliphonic environment of which the war is deeply complicit. The conceptual proposition unfolds within the streams as they remain thematically focused on the relational potentials of acoustic environments in which the belliphonic body materializes itself through its differential co-composing across experiential timespace. Each stream contains a narrative solicited from the artist to orient the listener toward a particular encounter with the war through which belliphonic (em)bodying is explored. The narratives describe the context of the stream, drawing the listener into situations in which the streamer entered a relational process.
These contingent situations are defined by collective vulnerability: war is there to be with and to live with in a new, livable relating that requires a great deal of inventiveness and attuned involvement between, and in-between, body and environment. As the streams unfold, it becomes hearable that the body emerging in its belliphonic relations shares the war by acting upon it, just as the war shares itself with the body by enabling its acting. The artists navigate this sense of belliphonic co-emergence as they explore these everyday environments and their situated consequences for the sensing body that is always in the process of orienting itself in response to violent ruptures. Whether it is an air raid siren or an alert on the phone reporting the trajectory of an aerial attack, the body is listening across the total performativity of a space, gathering acoustic cues and assessing its chances of survival.
Responding to the streams from her own acoustically situated position, Ukrainian cultural journalist and curator Yuliia Manukian writes about the conditions within which the collective belliphonic body operates, moving through and acting from within its invisible surroundings. Since the full-scale invasion, Ukrainians have been deeply aware of the genocidal intent of the enemy. They are immersed in a complex process of war, with all the actualizations and hauntings that make reflective consciousness of collective death an inevitable part of daily life. This is exemplified in Manukian’s engagement with the streams. When one of the streams suddenly cuts off, she is immediately concerned about potential danger facing the streamer:
Silence weighs heavily on my heart: he [the streamer] went offline as if lost to us forever […]. Death, though, doesn’t come as a shock anymore. It is so pervasive that it makes me wonder how I am still alive when so many of us have lost their lives. (Manukian 2022, translation mine)
Reflecting on a newly communitarian listening condition in which Ukrainians find themselves living in a time of war, Manukian points out that she continually negotiates her way of listening to the streams within the belliphonic space charged with mortal danger. In its heightened relational awareness, the belliphonic body recognizes itself as a target of missile strikes, knowing that it can be attacked at any given moment. The immediacy of war does not emerge through crude observation but is grasped through a cultivated sensibility that brings forth a new truth of the world as it is inhabited in the materiality of an acoustically mapped and sonically lived genocidal intent. “We may not have a tomorrow,” Manukian writes, speaking to what it feels like to be “we” in times of sustained aggression directed against the collective body and its warrior-sociality.
The realization that many Ukrainians in the “we” may not “live to see tomorrow” is further underscored by the wailing sirens in Manukian’s surroundings, which she hears simultaneously with the sirens from the stream. The war is harnessed and pluralized in the invisible and mobile sonic worlds to which “belliphonic auditors,” to use Daughtry’s term, are frequently exposed, listening to war both on the ground, from where they are, and across the grounds, from where they could possibly be in mobile connection with others.
Nazhyvo, in this sense of probing a site of togetherness from which to rethink the Ukrainian experience of the Russian invasion as an experience of collective sonic sensibility, reclaims the belliphonic body in its transindividual mode of knowing and unknowing a world that does not conform to depoliticized matters of fact but gathers itself contingently across politicized matters of concern and the modes of truth-making they bring into being.
In the Truths of Collective Streaming
In the project that examines the sonic impact of the Russian invasion, Leipzig-based artist Leon Seidel (2023) presents interviews with Ukrainian artists Natalka Revko, Oleksandr Rudovskyi, and Oleksandr Naselenko, who recount their firsthand auditory experiences of the invasion. The interviews elicit individual recollections of belliphonic violence, highlighting a collective sonic momentum of living with and through the war. The artists are asked to reflect on what it means to be inside the war through a mode of newly experienced sonic relations under belliphonic circumstances. As they tell their stories of sonic encounters, hauntings, and adaptations, it becomes evident that what they have lived through is an acoustically enacted situation in which one is contingently challenged by the routine conditions of war.
War is explored as an atmosphere of aggressive reclamations with which one establishes a form of relationality. Sounds and silences are understood as material expressions of appearances, disappearances, and liminalities in a companion animality that war becomes in its communicative difference. One must learn to coexist with this relentless force, a beastly being that keeps showing itself through signals and strikes, manifesting its sonic presence through things and creatures alike – whether they soar as flying objects or birds, reverberate through a phone or the airspace – in a totality of what becomes warwork’s ecological creation. As Naselenko’s interview reveals, life is measured by the incoming and outgoing artillery, by the enemy’s projectiles and the Ukrainian defenses, and by the long silences in between, gathering into a testimonial trace of sounds that attest to how the war echoes in everything, including the cries of disturbed seagulls.
The invasion holds a place for the body to dwell within the material complexity of aggression that is more than just a missile campaign launched to perform what Ukrainian environmental anthropologist Darya Tsymbalyuk (2022) has called the act of “erasure” in its multiple facets. The place of war, as it emerges through forces and matters, and through physical entanglements deepened by blurred boundaries of one’s sonically situated presence, is always indexed by the distribution of sounds and the heard, and by the continuities of auditory feedback. Aggression gains specificity and a resonant frequency, alongside the acoustic temporality that renders silence as menacing as sound. In his documentary 20 Days in Mariupol, Ukrainian filmmaker Mstyslav Chernov (2023) encapsulates this reality with haunting clarity: “…wars don’t start with explosions; they start with silence.”
Silence as a wartime condition of ruptured background noise is both a sign and a sound that auditors cannot ignore. It is a quiet-before-the-storm marked by anticipation and an acoustic expressivity of war-in-formation. Rudovskyi refers to it as a rupturing of life, of relations entwined with place. In his terms, belliphonic silence is contradictory, as it takes on two meanings (or feelings): the promise of immediate safety and that of foreseeable attack. In speculative terms, belliphonic silence is the sound of war in its potential, yet to be actualized. It is already aggressive in the imagination of those whose presence and absence (erasure) it may encompass. In more political terms, belliphonic silence is ordered by violent events in which disappearance, as a material more-than-human reality, is enacted. Disappearance, in its concrete temporality, can be as situated and contingent as the resonant silence of the abandoned seaport in Odesa that Revko recalls, recounting her experience.
Thinking with these interviews and back to Nazhyvo, I want to contemplate the practice of collective audio streaming as a particular knowing and sounding presence that Ukrainian artists seek to articulate and politicize. In probing Ukrainian being in war as being-with war, which the streams and the interviews make us deeply aware of, I am led by anthropologist Steven Feld’s argument for an acoustemology of place relations. Feld thinks from a standpoint of a relational body that operates in a mode of attunement and situated listening. To be in the surroundings is to be-with surroundings, cohabiting a place to which one becomes acoustically aware through immersion and implicated relationality. He writes:
Acoustemology, then, is grounded in the basic assumption that life is shared with others-in-relation, with numerous sources of action […] that are variously human, nonhuman, living, nonliving, organic, or technological. This relationality is both a routine condition of dwelling and one that produces consciousness of modes of acoustic attending, of ways of listening for and resounding to presence. (Feld 2015: 15)
In Feld’s text, acoustemology serves as a critique of Murray Schafer’s acoustic ecology by accounting for an acoustic condition of a relationscape and its more-than-human dimension. Feld focuses on human-bird relationality in the Bosavi rainforest, rethinking environmental existence as a heterogeneous relating and a contingent cohabiting of place. The Bosavi’s performative interaction with the forest is approached epistemologically rather than aesthetically, as “sounding-as and sounding-through-knowing” and framed as a relationally inclusive sonic mapping of place (Feld 2015: 19). Feld’s argument is structured around a new materialist and posthumanist perspective on scales of entanglements that might include a plurality of sounding presences committed to place and its ecological – collective – resonance. To be in acoustemological relation with a place is to reciprocate and reverberate through all there is that sounds. But what can it mean to be in acoustemological relation with a wartime environment in the technological context of collective audio streams that perform both commoning and mapping actions, while participating in the contingency of witnessing?
In many ways, Nazhyvo is an experiential project undertaken by artists as a way of knowing and thinking with a belliphonic place where they found themselves living. It is a project of collective sonic intelligence that calls for the credibility of the belliphonic body and its knowledges. Each stream situates the streamer within their techno-experiential encounter of an acoustic space inhabited and shared in an ontological resonance. The streamer choreographs a particular situation in which their sociality – warrior-sociality, survivor-sociality, IDP-sociality (internally displaced person) – emerges in the being-together of acoustic relations and from within the event of war. These socialities in relation are belliphonic socialities that enact warboundness as a condition of entanglement at the heart of more-than-human ontologies from which a contingent and plural Ukrainian testimony of the Russian invasion can be claimed.
The stream by Ivan Skoryna is called Chas Kopaty (Digging Day). It situates the listener within the Ukrainian experience of digging trenches, a mundane yet essential task performed by Ukrainian defenders as they brace themselves for a Russian assault. The stream is shaped by Skoryna’s own experience of joining a volunteer squad that helped a local unit of territorial defense during the first days of the full-scale invasion, when Russian forces advanced into the suburbs of Kyiv after seizing control of large areas of Ukraine. Skoryna does not narrate the story but sonifies the experience of collective knowing that his exhausted body performs, becoming as earthly as it possibly can in its relationship with the earth that it is now destined to provide protection from the Russian occupiers.
The stream is a performative iteration of a defensive measure - and a wartime human-earth relationality in its material-embodied complexity, impressed upon the listener as a continuum of sound within which Ukrainian warrior-sociality becomes diagrammatic – that is, an emergent mode of existence shaped through action and relation rather than a fixed identity. Digging, in this sense, is not merely a task but a form of attunement, a shared temporality with the living earth into which a Ukrainian warrior enters through laboring and sounding, and through collective breathing. The stream puts breathing at the heart of the digging experience, underscoring that the Ukrainian fight for life is all about endurance. Ukrainians simply cannot afford exhaustion: if they stop digging, if they halt their fight, the consequences could be dire – it could cost them their lives. To stop digging is to stop breathing, as literal as it gets in a three-hour-long acoustic study of Skoryna’s own breath-taking exhaustion.
Sound here originated from an undisclosed location within the greater Kyiv area, a site to which Skoryna returned for a second time in the autumn of 2022. Earlier that year, Skoryna had dug a trench at this very site under combat conditions and amid defensive maneuvers designed to mislead the enemy and draw attention away from actual defensive positions. The decision to withhold the location serves as a reminder that Ukrainians face an ongoing onslaught, and that these trenches may need to be swiftly utilized should Russian forces escalate their aggression. With each strike of the shovel, the stream amplifies Ukrainians’ determination to persevere, to keep digging and pressing forward despite overwhelming fatigue.
The streams Zakhovani Zvuky (Hidden Sounds) by Maksym Ivanov and Osinnia Ekskursiia (Autumn Excursion) by Viktor Konstantinov are transmitted from the war-torn cities of Dnipro and Odesa, respectively. Both cities have been subjected to relentless assaults by Russian forces, withstanding regular missile strikes and Shahed drone attacks. Despite the imminent danger, the artists chose to remain in their cities, offering us a listen into the stark realities of their surroundings. Their streams are devoid of explosive sounds and artillery blasts; instead they reach into the unsettling quiet of desolation, the haunting echoes of memories, and the resilient spirit of survival amid ruins, shelters, and the shadows of once-vibrant communities.
In her analysis of the streams, Manukian (2022) observes that Nazhyvo may disrupt one’s preconceptions of belliphonic soundscapes, often shaped by experiences of watching war films. Such films frequently rely on audio manipulation by sound editors to intensify dramatic effects, producing a highly mediated and stylized rendering of war as a lived experience. The belliphonic war encompasses a more complex reality of everyday situations, suffused with hazy sonic environments, dim presences, and blurry depths into which one entrusts oneself. Ivanov’s stream navigates this murky middle of being-with war in the everyday struggle to shelter life, to seal it in a shell of reinforced barriers, to retreat into a hideout between the walls of a flat, boarded up to withstand shock waves from bombardments.
The stream is relayed from Ivanov’s own flat, now serving him as a shelter due to the scarcity of dedicated shelters in Ukraine, a country under attack yet ill-prepared to withstand the invasion. The artist allocates exactly one hour of stream time to explore the acoustic relationality of the shelter space as it becomes manifest through the corporeal and material conditions of waiting for the next round of attacks. The curfew period is embraced as a shared time of inhabiting the sheltered world during the late-night hours leading up to dawn, when the atmosphere is charged with fear and anticipation. Within this confined space, Ivanov's stream becomes a lifeline, transmitting the hum of war as it reverberates through the street into the flat and back across the more-than-human materialities and existences through which one fathoms the ongoing making of a wartime world. Although the hum is traced to a specific location, it is collectively inhabited as a “long night of silence,” in Ivanov’s words. Silence, of course, is both a conceptual and experiential component of the belliphonic experience, for there is never an absence of sound but a felt anticipation of war in the absence of an audible attack.
Konstantinov’s stream is an acoustic drift through Ukrainian heritage sites in Odesa, the port city marred by the ravages of Russia’s attempts to obliterate Ukraine’s cultural identity. It is approached as a dérive, tracing a path through the space of Russia’s war as a war on Ukrainian culture and humanity. The war becomes a composite field of relations within which Konstantinov choreographs his presence as a survivor amidst forces of erasure that shape the everyday materialities of Russian aggression, manifested both in the military attacks on the city and in the reverberations of these attacks, experienced as abandonment, destruction, and loss. For Konstantinov, Odesa is a far cry from the vibrant city he once knew, bustling with life and energy. It is now a haunting echo of its former self, overshadowed by the ambient sounds of war: the rumbling of local trams transporting those who remain in the city despite the dangers, a stark absence of tourists that lingers in the once-lively streets, and a recent missile strike on the port that brought destruction to Odesa’s National Fine Arts Museum.
His survivor-sociality is woven into the fabric of life marked by traces of Russian politics, both past and present. These marks appear in various forms: from the neglected graves of Ukrainian Cossacks, forgotten during Soviet times; to the museum where Konstantinov volunteered to evacuate artworks in anticipation of the impending attacks; to the building where he sought refuge from Russian airstrikes, echoing the experiences of Ukraine’s prominent intellectual Yurii Lypa, who once lived in that very building a century ago, only to face persecution at the hands of Russian authorities; and, finally, to the city’s landmark where the Ukrainian-speaking poet Borys Necherda, whose literary contributions were overlooked due to his choice of language and style, is now commemorated.
Both the Dnipro- and Odesa-based streams invest in the quality of an encounter with the wartime world, one that produces survivor-sociality across the field of lived relation where things and beings share a life deepened by the consequences of violent conditions. War imposes itself on all matter, human and nonhuman, leaving scars across ecologies of living. It does not parse the world into passive objects and living subjects but attacks a collective assemblage – shelter and the sheltered (“Hidden Sounds”), excursion and the excursed (“Autumn Excursion”) – crafting vulnerability as commonality. The pool of “hidden” (indoor) and “exposed” (street) sounds holds the truth of experience and inscribes the war within the vibrational continuum of sound, where belliphonic actuality upholds no ontological hierarchy.
The two remaining streams are Zakhystok Tserkvy-Rotondy (Rotunda-Church Shelter) by Kseniia Yanus – broadcast from Uzhhorod, a city on the border with Slovakia – and Vidstan’ = Shlyakh = Zv’yazok (Distance = Way = Connection) by Kseniia Shcherbakova – streamed from Lviv, near the border with Poland. Since the full-scale invasion, both cities have become key hubs for IDPs seeking refuge and safety in regions of Ukraine farther from the Russian border. Yanus arrived in Uzhhorod from Odesa, where she relocated after fleeing her hometown, Donetsk, in 2014, following the onset of Russia’s war in eastern Ukraine. Her stream conveys an embodied sense of exile, encapsulating ten years of escape from war into an hour and a half spent searching for peace and quiet in the surroundings of the Transcarpathian church, the Horyanska Rotonda (Horyany Rotunda).
For Yanus, peace is not merely a possibility but a contingent conviction, a temporary pause in the ongoing reality of war. The stream orchestrates this pause as a totalizing situation of worldly sensibility, a play of certainty and uncertainty in a flow of appearances and obscurities humming in the background. Sounds become composites of forces from a larger ontological choreography where the more-than-human (of the animal, of the wind, of the field, of the world, of the war) manifests an experiential excess at the heart of sonic speculation, through which peace and war are channeled and, essentially, conveyed. Here, peace is transient, never fully realized as a lasting sonic presence, but rather fleetingly experienced and momentarily grasped before succumbing to the forces of war that Yanus acknowledges at the close of her stream, as the prayer for the fallen rises from within the war-bound space. The stream imparts the truth that, in Ukraine, one cannot escape the war, for it is omnipresent – its echoes reverberating through lives and situated existences, leaving no sanctuary untouched.
Shcherbakova’s Vidstan’ = Shlyakh = Zv’yazok navigates the urban landscape of wartime Lviv where the artist has recently resettled as an IDP from Odesa. The stream unfolds as a travelogue, detailing Shcherbakova’s experience of place and displacement as she moves through the city to a train station and boards a train to her hometown. In this acoustic undertaking, the journey is an act of overcoming the distance that Shcherbakova has traversed speculatively. In sounding the experience of distance as a shattered connection, she tells her story of loss and longing while living it in a visceral way. The stream is intended to communicate what the artist defines as a “restless state of forced displacement” shared by those fleeing from war.[7] The displaced body is an emplaced body already bound to war and its acoustic realities, which extend beyond the sounds of sirens and explosions to encompass a new restlessness of being – the invisible connections and disconnections, inhabitable and shared across time and space. Vidstan’ = Shlyakh = Zv’yazok embodies the material manifestation of the lived connection that the artist yearns to reestablish with those distanced from her. As she explores the very essence of connectivity, the stream becomes a speculative inquiry into the technological affordances of streamboxes, which facilitate acoustically rich interactions during periods of wartime separation. What if all Ukrainians could stream in and gather through their acoustic performativity? What if we could attend to the emergent polyphony of their being-with and being-in war?
The five streams, in their collective realization, concern the constitution of acoustic truths and how these truths harbor evidence of a lived invasion. The invaded world, as it is made hearable, cannot be foretold; it must be experienced. What the Ukrainian experience underscores is that the belliphonic cannot be contained within a taxonomy of war-generated sounds but must be discovered in the particularities of disruptions brought about by these (and other) sounds. The loss of peacetime is fathomed in the situational awareness of war as a wartime world constituted in (all, and all its) sound. The belliphonic body, as the streamers render hearable through creative stream-telling, is constituted in the totality of war environments, which can range from the coercive space of an attack and defensive operation to journeys of refuge and homecoming, to architectures of sheltering and sharing, and more. Despite their humanist aspects, however, these streams should not be reduced to the study of human experience or approached solely through the humanity of the streamers. They must be thought of in materialist terms, as acoustic traces and knowings through which to relate to what is entailed by more-than-human (war-)boundness.
Knowings and Traces
The position of acoustic knowings and traces is a posthumanist position through which to probe a contingent testimony of wartime life under Russia’s sonically expanded presence in Ukraine. “Knowings” here refer to more-than-human involvement in experiencing and evidencing, while “traces” refer to what constitutes the situated character of this involvement. Nazhyvo is a quest for knowing the war as a sonic condition shared by human and nonhuman beings and things, and their ephemeral temporalities, a condition in which the world is bound to, through, and with war, in sound. It is informed by an ethos of entangled relationality from which to construct an understanding of being-with war and the evidential knowledges and capacities it brings forth. What can it mean to sound from warbound? To testify through sounding the truth(s) of war?
I conclude my essay with these questions as a way to rethink Nazhyvo as a project that exposes the sonic reciprocity of a witnessing world. Hosted by the Zemlia povernennia, zemlia turboty lab that works toward an earth-centered Ukrainian testimony of the Russian invasion, the project operates on a fundamental commitment to acknowledge the living world’s right to and experience of witnessing. It resonates with other projects of the lab, especially Buchatska’s work Ide zapys in which Zemlia, the war-torn Ukrainian land, cratered from explosives, is given agency to testify to the Russian invasion. Buchatska engages with the political possibilities of “this world” doing the recording and becoming a living record. In her creative elaboration, recording is approached through the plurality of what it can be – experientially, materially, and technologically. Nazhyvo, too, must be placed alongside these efforts to recognize the truths of beings and things in a more-than-human populated world.
In her book on other-than-human forms of testimony, media theorist-artist Susan Schuppli (2020) argues for a way of truth-claiming that is radically inclusive, heterogeneous, and post-anthropocentric. She puts forth a perspective of “material as witness” to account for the evidential effects of events on ecologies of vibrant matter. Witness testimony cannot be reduced to the testimonial power of humans; instead, it should be extended to the agency of nonhumans and more-than-human entities. Truth is sought within the larger web of relations, where experience is acknowledged in its broader sphere, across all life. Can we think of sound through the materialism of its truths? In ways of witnessing that render these truths agentive?
The experience of the invasion that Ukraine as zemlia (territory, land, earth, ecosystem) is living – the experience that Zemlia povernennia, zemlia turboty recognizes and explores – informs a broader understanding of invasiveness as a condition sustained, among other ways, by the material and relational space of sound. The invaded environment and the invaded body that Nazhyvo attends to in mapping the war across belliphonic truths and lived socialities cannot be divided through sound. In sound, they coexist in a material – sonic – continuum as an indivisible field of knowings and traces within which truths cohabit.
The streams perform the actual possibilities of such cohabitation. Trenched earth, haunted shelter, abandoned city, displaced body, and lost connection are more than realities of human challenges. These are conditions of an invasion lived cross-referentially, not only in the encounters of artists-streamers whose presences and sensibilities invite greater attention to wartime concerns, but across a broader spectrum of experiences and reverberations that persist into a contingent, multilateral, and collective testimony. Knowledges of the invasion are drawn from all sounds and every truth claim they make, challenging the existing imaginary of belliphonic war.
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