Contribution short abstract:

In these dark times Ukrainian women visual artists track as much as they trace a history of ecocide in progress since the beginning of the Russian imperialist war. Among them, three photographers in particular invited me to approach differently the term "ecofeminism".

Contribution long abstract:

They are about ten Ukrainian women visual artists to be recognized as those who reinvent the link between the various forms of life, the relationships between humans and non-humans, the anthropomorphism between the woman's body and the Earth... and the way in which war turns everything upside down, ravages, violates, crushes to the point of extreme situations. Thus, they track as much as they trace a history of ecocide in progress since the beginning of the Russian imperialist war. Among them, three photographers in particular, invited me to approach differently the term that has become so convenient and so fashionable of "ecofeminism". What can be described as subjective ecological commitments open up to a distribution of the sensible that renders obsolete any prefabricated definition to be applied to a reality that in this way would ultimately continue to escape us. Together, with Yana Kononova, Xeniia Petrovska, Oleksandra Zborovska, as we have built up a certain sisterhood since 2022, we have embarked on a research-creation project on the position of women photographers in the face of ecocide. One of our goals is to revisit visual anthropology by engaging with the works and their narratives, insofar as they open up to speculative practices that tell the story of historical processes, a transnational dialogue with subaltern that leads to reconsider gender and decoloniality, and a fresh look at images of borderline situations that broach the notion of uncanny.