There are, as life dictates, many twos; each equipped with their sets of intervals, recesses and pauses. Many and one between(s). The third term, as I would call it, which keeps the creative potential of a new relationship alive between strategic nationality and transnational political alliance.
–Trinh T. Minh-ha1
internodes / міжвузля is a web-based platform that brings together Ukrainian multidisciplinary artists, filmmakers, writers, and curators to reflect on how kinship is being defined and redefined in the face of war, displacement, and ecocide. It is an initiative of intersections. internodes / міжвузля seeks to connect rather than isolate, and imagine as well as act rather than surrender.
Internodes are spaces between. The word’s translation, міжвузля, contains the word вузoл, or knot in Ukrainian. “Node” and “internode” are terms most often used in biology, referring to the sections of a plant stem that are between the budding of new leaves or stems. The title’s connection to knots additionally gestures towards a kind of network building – the portions of rope perhaps between knots of solidarity or community that bind us together. Internodes / міжвузля as terms also expands the notion of a family or kinship tree, emphasizing the space or connection between points, rather than the single entities that comprise categorizing delineations of belonging. The conceptualization of kinship in this line of thought is one based in connectivity. As such, internodes / міжвузля resonates with Donna Haraway’s understanding of “kin” as “an assembling sort of word.”2
Through a wide array of contributions, ranging from audio to video, and images to text, the project engages several aspects of the agency of kin-making. Themes of nourishment, embodied encounters with land, and the seeking out of connection across disparate temporalities and geographies are central currents that run throughout the projects contributed to the site for its launch in July 2024. The contributions touch on the formation of artist collectives such as MemoryLab; the fostering of kinships across time and distance as reflected upon by Asha Bukojemsky, Alina Tenser, and Yaroslava Abramova; the work of community activists like Angelik Ustymenko and the group Rebel Queers; the solidarities that emerge through and in spite of digital infrastructures addressed in the work of fantastic little splash; and the kinds of kins that are formed between landscapes and bodies as explored by Iryna Zamuruieva and Karolina Uskakovych.
Together, these initial contributions to internodes / міжвузля probe questions such as:
What does noticing and nurturing collective dreams of living and letting live look like?3
What are the affective powers of making kin beyond human entities and socio-political boundaries?
By acknowledging shared precariousness, how do we take on the agency of kin-making as a way of envisioning shared futures? Following Adolfo Albán Achinte, how is “re-existence as resistance” being enacted? 4
Above all, internodes / міжвузля cultivates a context for dialogue. As part of the Ukrainian diaspora, I have not been directly impacted by the atrocities of the war in Ukraine, which has been ongoing since 2014, and has escalated with the full-scale invasion in February 2022. Acknowledging this positionality, my approach to this project and this framing text embraces what Donna Haraway, Anna Tsing, and Maria Puig deLa Bellacasa have articulated as a “withness” – an approach of listening, thinking, and writing that has “contagious potential,” in its radical collectivization. A practice of “withness” reveals itself as “both descriptive (it inscribes) and speculative (it connects). It builds relation and community, that is: possibility…[it] belongs to, and creates, community by inscribing thought and knowledge in worlds one cares about in order to make a difference.”5
Alongside a practice of “withness” the project also takes up what filmmaker and writer Trinh T. Minh-ha calls “speaking nearby,” which is:
A speaking that does not objectify, does not point to an object as if it is distant from the speaking subject or absent from the speaking place. A speaking that reflects on itself and can come very close to a subject without, however, seizing of claiming it. A speaking in brief, whose closures are only moments of transition opening up to other possible moments of transition – these are from of indirectness well understood to anyone in tune with poetic language…it is an attitude in life, a way of positioning oneself in relation to the world.6
Together, these approaches manifest in the project as multimodal engagements with the thematics of kinship, that ultimately do not aim to be an aesthetically and argumentatively cohesive exposition of artistic works. Rather, the platform offers a chance to listen, write, grieve, gather, and reflect with one another as a means of forging more expansive and generative understandings of kinship that ground us in principles of accountability, care, and solidarity.
About the projects
Iryna Zamuruieva’s excerpts from her text, Into kin-regions with Horysvit vesnianyi is the first to take on the notion of kin-making with more-than-human entities. The work poetically meanders through landscapes of Horytsvit vesnianyi (Adonis vernalis), a perennial plant common to the steppes of Ukraine. Horytsvit vesnianyi is a conduit for dreaming and for reflecting on how we make and imagine kin in a Ukrainian context. Taking up Horytsvit vesnianyi as kin, Iryna works with the term “ridnyi krai,” which points to a homeland, or ancestral land, but incorporates a wider notion of “kin” or rid” that is extended beyond blood connections or territorial boundaries, interpreted in her prose as “kin-land.”
To be of a place and to care for it cannot be defined solely by genetic material, or bloodline. As Iryna insists, “Ridnyi krai lets me say, I am of this place, of this used-to-be-steppe-turned-cracked-concrete-surface-and-wrecked-soils-yet-blossoming-land. I am of this place, of this apricot, apple, plum, walnut and cherry trees and spirea shrubs and so much more.”7 I am deeply indebted to Iryna’s reflections on transnational, grounded, and accountable modes of kin-making, which have been key to the formulations of this project.
Tended by Karolina Uskakovych further explores the human and more-than-human entanglements of kin and land, through photographs and interviews with three Ukrainians about their gardening practices. By way of collected anecdotes and traces of the organic materiality of plants, the project highlights how kinship with the local environment and land is expressed through care of gardens. Against the backdrop of war, climate crisis, and extractive industrial agriculture, small gardens serve as sources of stability, attunement to the landscape, and curiosity about the natural world. The images are created using a anthotype method, developed directly by sunlight and plants from individual plots.
The nurturing of interpersonal relationships, a kind of collecting nourishment through gathering, listening, writing, uniting, and at times eating, also resonates through the various contributions.
MemoryLab’s About the salt, the bitter, the forbidden and the sweet shows intimate glimpses into the formation of this artistic collective and community around it. Through video, text, and snapshots, we see and hear conversations about types of varenyky (stuffed dumplings), and discussions on the dangers of smoking lead into chants for poetry. Lullabies and children’s songs percolate their way through video footage resembling home movies, songs of memory that stay with the body. Dreams are recounted, sunscreen is slathered on backs, pizza is eaten on the floor with dirty feet. In the summer of 2023, this collective was striving to make their own sort of world within the world: the salt, the bitter, the forbidden, and the sweet then becomes their kind of recipe for living, eating, being, caring together.
Asha Bukojemsky’s essay, Reflections on Care – Kyiv to LA, also engages with the fostering of relationships, raising the question of how we make kin within artistic institutions and endeavors. In response to the full scale invasion, Bukojemsky founded a residency program called Kyiv to LA, which is an ongoing cross-cultural initiative inviting Ukrainian artists and researchers working across film to participate in a Los Angeles-based residency and public program. Asha’s contribution considers the actualization of support and care in the development and running of the residency, a space which operated, in part, as an opportunity for rest, for the invited participants. Her text thinks through how we really care for one another beyond a structure of curator and artist, and how we can support lasting modes of kin-making with artists that do not stop at the production of discrete work.
The maintaining of relationships across distance is taken up by Alina Tenser and Yaroslava Abramova, whose project Friendship exchanges sewn prompts with one another. The contribution is a haptic continuation of a lifelong friendship which began while in a daycare center in the 1980s in Kyiv. Using fragments from their daily lives – such as grocery bags, outgrown children’s clothing, and parking violations – Alina and Yaroslava intertwine their experiences through these tactile exchanges, which navigate the complexities of the mail system and Ukraine’s closed air traffic space. The intimacies of the seams, sewn with the same gold thread, and bearing the traces of each other’s hands, as well as the fragments of quotidian life seek to stitch together an understanding of the others’ daily existence, bound together through years of continually nurtured friendship and exchange.
That's where you come from, where the name comes from, where it comes from is an audio essay by the collective fantastic little splash. Combining field recordings, interviews, interludes of static, and composed music, the piece takes a deeply interpersonal look at the experience of information threats during wartime. Navigating the embodied and psychological impacts of FIMI (Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference), the essay knits together reflections on how information warfare practices polarize and spread uncertainty among communities, and also sheds light on the alienation that arises between those who have been living through the war in Ukraine and those who observe it from afar, contending with modes of finding common ground between these disparate experiences and realities that exist both online and offline.
Angelik Ustymenko’s contribution, Rebel Queers: Ukraine’s Queer Resistance combines text, image, and documentary video, tracing the beginnings and evolution of Rebel Queers, a community that, before the full-scale invasion, were a group subversive graffiti artists advocating for queer rights on the streets of Kyiv. Following the beginning of the invasion, the intentions of the group changed, shifting to document the experiences of queer Ukrainians during wartime, and specifically those serving in the military. Angelik and Rebel Queers’ work is ongoing, rising up to answer to the times, to the injustices and violences happening across the world by asserting and enacting practices of transnational solidarity that make clear how, “none of us are free until all of us are free.”
I cannot muster the ‘we’ except by finding the way in which I am tied to ‘you,’ by trying to translate but finding my own language must break up and yield if I am to know you…This is how the human comes to being, again and again, as that which have yet to know.
– Judith Butler 8
The internodal space and its relationship to liminality further resonates with the etymological roots of the word “Ukraine.” Borrowed from Polish Ukraina or Russian Украи́на (Ukraína), from Old East Slavic оукраина (ukraina), the name of the nation has commonly been taken to have meant "borderland, marches.” Another interpretation, however, has also been put forward by Ukrainian scholars, suggesting that Ukraine meant, "region, country, the land around (a given center),” or in (= near) the kray, i.e. ‘border territory,’ others - with the nouns kray, country in the sense of "native region, own country, native land ; a land inhabited by its own people."9
How does one strictly define kinship within a context that is in-between? Butler underscores the importance of not regarding kin relations as ever fully autonomous, articulating how these relations:
do not form a perfectly closed-off object of study precisely because on the one hand, they are ghosted by power and often by violence, embedded in technologies and property relations, and, on the other hand, they are capable of exceeding and confounding the very definitions within which they are said to work even as they work…forms of kinship are not already fully made and never will be; they are striated with unlived futurities.10
Making kin, with humans, with non-humans, with those that share our place of birth, or with those who were born halfway across the world is an act of thinking about futurities and imagining otherwise. It is also, following Lauren Berlant, a form of compassionate resistance. Making kin bears a responsibility and commitment to a compassionate political approach, defying the boundaries set up by socio-political entities. As Donner and Goddard write in Kinship and the Politics of Responsibility:
Although kinship may be encapsulated by the state, it is not contained by it; that kinship exceeds the state and is both immoderate and ‘immodern’. Kinship contains an excess of meaning and affect and since the demands for care and love stemming from kinship’s relationality are inexhaustible and the boundaries of its inclusion are movable, they are perhaps infinitely extendible.11
As such, internodes / міжвузля is an initiative that foregrounds relationality, solidarity, and reciprocity as the bases for kinship. While highlighting the struggle, loss, and resilience of Ukraine and its people, particularly in the contemporary moment, the overarching intent of the project is to re-imagine how we can cultivate kin in ways that go beyond delineations of nationality. It is a call to practices of care and non-selective empathy, by activating attunement across many scales not with the goal of assimilation but, more powerful harmonization. In this vein, anthropologist/sociologist Zoe Todd and geographer/sound artist Anja Kanngieser articulate a practice of kin studies in their work, a practice which underscores the importance of situated knowledge, and is about “cultivation of, and attendance to, relations,” both in their dissonance and in their alignment.12 Kin studies attends to “the concrete and tangible ways that we are all implicated, in one way or another, in the co-constitution of existence,” across scales as well as human and non-human entities. Most importantly, Todd and Kanngieser insist on how kin studies, “means accepting that our survival is bound together, and that any system that kills the most so that the least can live is liberatory to none.”13
Returning to Trinh T. Minh-ha, internodes / міжвузля situates itself amidst many worlds, acknowledging how “the dive up and down within self-set boundaries leads nowhere, unless self-set devices to cross them are also at work. Moving from flight to flight, more of us have come to see, not only that we live in many worlds at the same time, but also that these worlds are, in fact, all in the same place—the place each one of us is here and now.”14
This project, in its initiation, convenes and cultivates collective reflection, listening, and re-envisioning of kinship in a contemporary Ukrainian context, including the diaspora. However, the project intends to broaden this context, and speak with and to other communities as well. The works highlighted above are merely a seed, and I encourage you to share your own reflections, images, dreams, or fears, as a way to amplify a sense of collectivity, and strengthen solidarity across many entities, lands, and peoples. Let us gather and grow in solidarity, whatever our cultural, historical, or linguistic background may be, by recognizing how selective empathy is only a detriment to each of our struggles.
During the Maidan Revolution in Kyiv in 2014, the refrain “I am a drop in the ocean” reverberated across the streets, speaking to the power of gathering. In the framework of this project, I consider myself one node among many, seeking to connect to other nodes in this network that can only be built together. I compel you to sit in, to walk out, to listen, to read, to sing, to shout, to mourn, to take on the potential of your own node to act, even if through a small gesture. Nodes connecting to nodes, we can work towards enacting more expansive forms of resistance through reciprocally resonating visions of re-existence.
– Maya Hayda
If you’d like to contribute - drop a line with your idea to
internodes.internodes@gmail.com
or send a message on Instagram @internodes.internodes!
1 Trinh T. Minh-ha, Elsewhere, Within Here: Immigration, Refugeeism and the Boundary Event, (London: Routledge, 2011), 113.
2 Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 103.
3 Iryna Zamuruieva, “Adonis vernalis dreamings: (re)making kin with a place,” part of “Beyond the colonial vortex of the ‘West’: Subverting non-western imperialisms before and after 24 February 2022”. South/South Movement, 2023, https://www.southsouthmovement.org/dialogues/adonis-vernalis-dreamings-re-making-kin-with-a-place/, accessed June 17, 2024.
4 Adolfo Albán Achinte, “Artistas Indígenas y Afrocolombianos: Entre las Memorias y las Cosmovisiones. Estéticas de la Re-Existencia,” Arte y Estética en la Encrucijada Descolonial, (Buenos Aires: Del Siglo, 2009), 83–112.
5 Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, “‘Nothing Comes Without Its World’: Thinking with Care,” The Sociological Review, 60(2), (2012): 203.
6 Trinh T. Minh-ha, Nancy N. Chen, “'Speaking Nearby': A Conversation with Trinh T. Minh-ha,” Visual Anthropology Review 8, no. 1 (1992): 87.
7 Iryna Zamuruieva,”Into kin-regions with Horysvit vesnianyi (excerpts),” as part of internodes / міжвузля, 2024, https://internodes.cargo.site/iryna-zamuruieva.
8Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, (New York: Verso, 2004), 49.
9 Григорій Півторак, “«Україна» — це не «окраїна»”, Litopys, http://litopys.org.ua/pivtorak/pivt12.htm, accessed June 20, 2024.
10Judith Butler, "Kinship beyond the Bloodline" In Queer Kinship: Race, Sex, Belonging, Form, edited by Tyler Bradway and Elizabeth Freeman, 25-47, (New York, USA: Duke University Press, 2022), 40.
11 Henricke Donner, Victoria Goddard, “Kinship and the politics of responsibility: An introduction,” Critique of Anthropology, 43(4), (2023): 355.
12 Zoe Todd, Anja Kanngieser, “Attending to Environment as Kin Studies,” part of Constellations. Indigenous Contemporary Art from the Americas, organised by the Hyundai Tate Research Centre: Transnationaland The Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC), October, 2020: 1, https://muac.unam.mx/constelaciones/assets/docs/essay-kanngieser-and-todd.pdf, accessed June 17, 2024.
13 Ibid, 3.
14 Minh-ha, Elsewhere, Within Here, 56.
Curated by Maya Hayda
Special thanks to the artists, Fabrica Research Centre, the Jenni Crain Foundation, my wonderful fellow Fabricanti and Tatiana Egoshina for her design magic.