Defined by silence

Despite the fact that these days, so much is being said, shown, and written about Ukraine and the war that Russia waged on her; despite all the news, numerous interviews and videos of President Zelensky speaking to whoever is willing to listen; despite constant buzz in the Ukrainian segments of social media where people coordinate humanitarian help, support to the territorial defense units, the relocation of people, and million other urgent matters; despite all these the inner condition, the state of being of the country is probably best defined by the word ‘silence.’ 

Silence can stem from different circumstances and possess various qualities. It can be voluntary or forced, deafening or revealing, powerful or paralyzing. What unites all these is absence as an antonym to presence; the absence of something that could have been but is not. This silence in Ukraine in the middle of murderous noise is the absence of the words, expressions, thoughts, actions, intentions that could have been said, stated, done, shown, uttered if there was no war.

Silence also does not necessarily mean the absence of people, quite the contrary – the more people whose voices have been silenced, the more deafening and horrible it grows. This is especially true when talking about culture: Ukrainian culture today is a void compiled of empty spaces that could have been filled with books, exhibitions, performances that did not happen –  and most probably, will not happen for a long time.

Kinder Album: Ukrainian Titans Holding Up the Sky. 2022, published on Instagram. Image courtesy of the artist Kinder Album.

Back in 2014, at the de facto onset of the current invasion – occupation of Crimea and the war in Eastern Ukraine, –  the outstanding Ukrainian writer Oksana Zabuzhko switched from her writing  to producing endless interviews and articles, predominantly for western media. She called it ‘getting into a tank’ – an expression which later became a title for her collection of essays and interviews.

Yet again, everything was brought to a halt on 24 February this year, but on much larger and more terrifying scale. 

This time another outstanding Ukrainian writer, Sofia Andruchovych wrote: ‘Before the war, I was a writer. Today, on the ninth day, I feel unable to string two words together’. 

Film director Marina Stepanska stated on her Facebook in A Letter from Ukraine: ‘I used to be a filmmaker, now I’m not.’

Meanwhile, artist Lesya Khomenko left everything in her studio in Kyiv and took to Ivano-Frankivsk in Western Ukraine with her daughter, and started a lab for displaced artists. She calls it ‘a therapeutic space’ to look at the current situation and try to deal with it through collaborative work. She says, ‘We left all our works behind, we are left with nothing, without a biography. When some might have their works digitalized, others like myself have only material pieces.’

So, what are the voices of the silence? What happens to art (and artists) during the war? The question is twofold. One problem is what happens instead of art that did not happen. The other: what happens to art that already happened.

The art that already happened

A few days after the war started, globalmedia picked up the story of Maria Prymachenko’s works being destroyed as a local history museum burned down after missile hit in Ivankiv, near Kyiv. The story went viral spreading from arts magazines and newspapers to mainstream media: colorful phantasmagoric images of Prymachenko’s imagined flora and fauna covering printed pages and newsletters. 

Shortly after, thenews surfaced that some of the paintings may have been saved by locals – maybe even more than those destroyed. It is worth noting that the main collection of her works was stored elsewhere in the first place. Yet, this information never made it to the top headlines, and neither did the news about the destroyed or severely damaged museums in Kharkiv, Mariupol, or Chernihiv. 

A powerful visionary painting by Maria Primachenko: May That Nuclear War Be Cursed! 1978. Fair Use via Wikiart.

Was this information simply swallowed by the tsunami of other news? Lost among the daily reports of children being killed, civilians kept hostage, whole cities destroyed? Maybe people simply more important than artworks, allowing the threat to lives overshadowing the problem of cultural heritage? It may have been affected by  the authorities’ reinforced demand not to publish any visuals and not to disclose the locations of the missile hits and destruction? 

Or was this silence already internalized and accepted? Did museum workers and cultural professionals remain silent because they understood that any information about the collections, their whereabouts, their conditions or further prospects equaled putting a target on them?

On the other hand, the uproar about the destruction of Prymachenko’s works might have concentrated on something other than the artist, or even the works. It might have been another omission created by the war, a tangible example of loss when  destruction was the only story to tell. 

In war, the materiality of destruction prevails over the materiality of existence. The physical pressure and the finite mass of the rubble left after the missile hits a building feels like the end of the sentence. All said. Period. Nothing can be done. Time to move on. 

But those who survive, be they people or objects, need their stories and histories. Without them, Prymachenko stays a ‘folk’ artist whose works appeared on postal stamps, was awarded an art prize (notably, both these happened still under the Soviet Union), and was praised by Picasso.  These little scraps of info were mentioned all over international media. 

In this context, her unique story as an autodidact who never left her village, her cosmovisions of interconnectedness of life that blurred the borders between the reality and dreams, the role of her works for the generations of Ukrainian artists and in forging Ukrainian cultural identity have no place and no attention. In the place where a story should be told, there is silence.

Even more silence occupied places of stories that could have been told. Museum collections are stored in basements in undisclosed locations,: and museum directors refuse to talk about the specifics; activists raise funds and collect basic necessities to support the people who save the artworks. Grassroots initiatives like the Museum Crisis Center provide packaging material and fire extinguishers, prioritizing museums in small towns and villages. These objects of varying value, origin, and provenance,are parts of a cultural heritage that would need to be exhibited, contextualized and analyzed, woven into the complex history of a country whose people were deprived of history for a long time. But right now, security prevails over the need of storytelling.

And then there are the artworks of living artists too, left in studios and galleries basements, sometimes rescued by volunteers or fellow artists, sometimes already lost forever.

The art that did not happen

If some of these works are never to be recovered, what does it make them? Will they be merely a ‘lost biography’, in Lesya Khomenko’s words? Are they an already lost heritage? And what’s the difference? When and if the images, the digital copies of these works are to be exhibited sometime in the future, how will the present, material objects created by the same artists during the war look next to them? Perhaps, there will be a note, a small caption next to each of them saying something like ‘This work was not the one planned by the artist or created out of her/his good will. It was created by the war.’ 

Alevtina Kakhidze is one of the artists to document her experiences since the second day of the war, utilizing her vast international recognition and  network all over Europe and in Russia. In her first war drawings – the first pages in her ongoing visual diary published on her Facebook page –, Alevtina tried to call on Russian artists and intellectuals to take to the streets. 

Over the next days and weeks, she and her husband in their house in the suburbs of Kyiv with their dogs, enduring shelling and the threat of the possible invasion, her drawings transformed into imprints of her daily experiences. Starting from sleeping in the basement without electricity or internet connection, spanning all the way into visual discussions about the origin of Russian imperialism and the need to decolonize Russian culture. 

Alevtina Kakhidze, Cancel Russian culture. 2022, published on Facebook. Image courtesy of the artist Alevtina Kakhidze.

Alevtina, who is also a performance artist, picked up her peculiar visual language of fast drawing, small on-the-go sketches in a previous series of works where she criticized consumer society. But her world changed in 2014 when war became a huge part of her realilty because her mother, as so many other people of age, refused to leave their homes on the occupied territories in Eastern Ukraine. 

Phone calls between mother and the daughter, sketches of the mother’s life under the occupation, and other aspects of the war’s political reality built up an extensive visual diary; 2D performances where colorful schematic figures were surrounded by words in different languages – Russian, Ukrainian, English. 

Alevtina Kakhidze, Birthday. 2022, published on Facebook, available via Artists for Ukraine. Image courtesy of the artist Alevtina Kakhidze.

These drawings from 2014 on are not sketches for something else, not preparation for the bigger work, as artists’ diaries and sketchbooks often are. They are snapshots of the moment, visual notes, messages mainly to oneself (and then, to others) not to forget, not to let go even if sometimes that’s exactly what one yearns to do..

Maidan, the occupation of Crimea, and the war in Donbas have changed not just the visual language, but the way artists perceive themselves. As many said during, and especially right after Maidan: when the unthinkable and unimaginable was happening, artists turned into regular citizens, activists, human beings doing whatever they could to help the situation. Even more important, however, was that the inner permission ‘to not be an artist’: allowed not to imagine or reflect, let alone represent, but instead collect, record, save, and try to keep reality intact. 

Already then, eight years before the full-scale invasion and war unfolded, artists were collecting the evidence of atrocities. The struggle for a visual language to grasp and speak about the reality was an attempt to (re)claim agency and to own the narrative, to dare and see the war and its aftermath with their own understanding, not through the imagery supplied by mass-media or commercial culture, and avoiding the recycling art of other wars or conflicts. The aim has been to build a unique form of expression, one that transcends mere tropes; one that is true to the reality of the here and now.

Peripheral vision

Writing about the frames of war, Judith Butler inquired about how the framing of the image of war through cameras affects the materiality of war and influences public discourse about it. She extensively analyzed how the frame of an image includes and excludes certain parts of a narrative, forming resistance potential on the margins; in those zones of exclusion something is undisclosed and the numbers of casualties are not self-explanatory (1). However, Butler writes about the politics of framing the materiality of war for the external gaze. But what happens on the inside, when the perception is framed by someone’s own eyes? What will fall on a blind spot, what is oushed to the periphery?

For those living the daily reality of this current war, the materiality and violence are framed by the Ukrainan government’s explicit ban on the use of the immediate images of destruction – this ban was introduced for security reasons, however, there is an increasing number of cases of international media and Telegram channels violating this ban. 

This experience is complemented by the unspoken expectation of international media to limit the expression of strong emotions. It somehow seems that being openly emotional, like expressing pain or rage, deprives the speaker, regardless of her or his recent experience, of the assumptions of rationality, dignity, and thus of agency and a valid voice.

It is on the margins of this frame that artists often step in.

‘My husband, artist and musician @maxrobotov is a lieutenant in the Ukrainian army now. He sent me his photo because I was curious what it looked like. Taking photos of soldiers and military objects is forbidden now in Ukraine because of the war. Before the escalation of the war, I was contemplating the commonalitiesof the military optic and artistic view. Max represents both positions now,’ wrote Lesya Khomenko on her Facebook page in mid-March. Below is her painting of the photo of her husband, bareheaded, in half-military half-civilian clothes, giving military salute. It’s her first work after February 24 and after relocation to Western Ukraine. Somewhere behind the surface of this clearly distanced, even formal painting and behind the artist’s calm words is fear, suffocating fear never to be able to see your loved one again.

Lesya Khomenko’s portrait of her husband, based on a photo, 2022. Image courtesy of the artist Lesya Khomenko.

Kateryna Lysovenko spent a few nights in a bomb shelter in Kyiv with her two children and a cat before relocating first to Lviv, then to Poland, and soon to Austria. Lysovenko created a number of smaller watercolours while on the road. Schematic, flat, almost faceless figures stand against the grim background, almost dissolving in it. One of the works says ‘Propaganda of the living world. Stop murder.’

Kateryna Lysovenko, Propaganda of the living world. Stop murder. 2022. Image courtesy of the artist Kateryna Lysovenko.

The living world, human and non-human relations, care for the world but also the care of a mother for her child had been Kateryna’s topics well before the war. Arriving in Poland, lost and disoriented, her children deeply traumatized, she got a residency support from BWA Zielona Góra.  There she goes back to large-scale painting: human figures get more shape and sometimes even faces, they are mostly female, carrying or holding, sometimes cradling children. She’s almost back to her usual imagery with a few striking exceptions, however: on most works, the colors are gone or faded, and once in a while, maybe on especially emotionally hard days, the strong corporeality of bodies shrinks again to small, shapeless figures, piled up in a mass graves or spread on the ground, raped, bleeding. 

Kateryna Lyvosenko, They Can Repeat. 2022, published on Instagram. Image courtesy of the artist Kateryna Lysovenko.

Accompanying the images of her works on her Instagram, another diary of the war, the artist writes, ‘I carry gardens of sorrow, gardens of anger from irreparable loss, I remember everything that disappears, I want to breathe deeper to accommodate more, I am now a moving cemetery.’

Kateryna Lysovenko, Gardens of Sorrow. 2022, published on Instagram. Image courtesy of the artist Kateryna Lysovenko.

Bodies, shapeless ones looking more like outlines or abstract figurines or more definitively feminine, are one of the main symbols in the imagery of this war. Shapeless ones usually come en masse – in bomb shelters or train stations. Female ones, naked and apparently vulnerable, protect, embrace, or stop the tanks, like in the works of the female artist who works under the alias Kinder Album; iothers grow into and with the nature, turning into birds, animals or vegetation, like in works by Sana Shakhmuradova.

Sana Shakhmuradova: Dedicated to victims (women, children, civilians) raped, tortured, suffered and died because of Russian inhumane attack and violence. 2022, published on Instagram. Image courtesy of the artist Sana Shakamuradova.

The imagery and symbolism of these and many other artists’ diaries are very simple and schematic, lines are fast, colors are rough, emotions are raw. Even if already exhibited somewhere in exile, these works are still mostly meant as notes to oneself, semi-public diaries available on social media, a regular exercise in seeing and feeling without a chance to escape. 

They remind of what is seen should never become unseen and what’s been understood can never be dismissed. The overwhelming reality of this war needs to find its way onto the physical surface of paper, canvas, or wall, to stop it from being forgotten.

Kinder Album, Russian Soldiers Rape Women in Ukrainian Cities. 2022, published on Instagram. Image courtesy of the artist Kinder Album.

As for male artists and the male imagery of the war, the silence is even more literal. Many notable artists as well as writers, actors, film directors, researchers, and other intellectuals, voluntarily enlisted either into the army or into the territory defense units. The works they could have drawn, painted, written, filmed, is now covered in the throbbing silence of the war.

Testimonial

International discussions about the role and function of art in the war are tailored to notions like ‘healing’ and ‘peaceful mutual understanding.’Neither of these are expressed in the current works of Ukrainian. 

It is testimony, it is the evidence of the tragedy that should have never happened, but indeed it has. It’s a powerful emancipatory work to create a visual language that can grasp these events, the loss, the emotions; to record this particular present in a new, uncomfortable yet distinct voice.

After the first major wave of the pandemic, Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe wrote, ‘fundamental vulnerability is the very essence of humanity (2).’ 

Art conceived as a daily practice of seeing and enduring is an evidence to this fundamental vulnerability.

(1) Judith Butler Frames of War. When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2010)

(2) Mbembe, Achille. ‘The Weight of Life. On the Economy of Human Lives.’ Eurozine. https://www.eurozine.com/the-weight-of-life/. Publication date: 06.07.2020.

The demographic, political and economic power of each generation of Romanians

We carefully examined a number of significant variables that have shaped the lives of each generation of Romanians: the country’s urbanization, as well as its democratic and economic development.

This type of „census” was selected because, in recent years, the concept of generations has popped up frequently in discussions on how to understand today’s citizens and how Romania sees its future.

Millennials have received the greatest attention, from books to studies and articles, all in an effort to highlight some patterns that, in the end, might explain certain economic and social behaviors.

Today, companies compete in developing the best strategies to attract new generations.  Marketing agencies go above and beyond to develop new and innovative customer loyalty plans for Millennials.

Although generations are often characterized by the same time frame, in actuality, there are significant regional variations in their behavior and characteristics.

The primary concerns we seek to address in this visual project are what generations in Romania look like from a broad social and economic perspective and what Romania looks like in the present generation.

Generations of Romania. Demographic power

Romania has a special category of Gen Xers. They are called „Decreții” – English meaning: those born after the Decree (Decree 770 was a decree of the communist Romanian government of Nicolae Ceaușescu, signed in 1967. It banned abortion and contraception for the sake of a new and large Romanian population).

Thus, Romania has a whole sub-generation of „children born out of patriotic duty”.

This is why Generation X, individuals born between 1965 and 1980, dominate the current demographic structure of the country.  The majority of them were born shortly after the signing of Decree 770 and are 52-53 years old (in 2021).

The charts below show the country’s entire demographic structure, broken down by age and gender.

Distribution of the population by generation (number of people, in 2021):

Romania’s demographic structure is dominated by Generation X

A quarter of the resident population, or more than 4.6 million individuals, are Generation Xers. 21% are Baby Boomers, whereas 20% are Millennials. The Alpha Generation, the children of the Millennials, is the smallest population group, as a result of the low birth rates of the past years.

Moreover, the number of births has decreased drastically since 1990. The lowest number of births in the last 30 years was reported in 2021. In 1990, there were 314 thousand births, but in 2021, there were only 180 thousand.

More boys are born in Romania

Looking at the gender distribution, it is interesting to note that, with the exception of the Silent Generation and the Baby Boomers, males outnumber women in all other generations.

In older generations, the answer is simple: women have a higher life expectancy, while males of a given age have a higher incidence of cardiovascular disease. This is why women outnumber males in these generations.

For younger generations, however, the trend in Romania contrasts with what we have been seeing globally. Romania has witnessed an increase in the number of male births during the last 30 years.

Generations of Romania. Political power

 The demographic dominance of Generation X is also felt in terms of political representation. The elected representatives at both the local and national levels are mainly Generation Xers. However, the beginning of a political power transfer to the next generation, the Millennials, may be witnessed soon. Millennials have begun to actively participate in political campaigns in the last several rounds of elections, and they have garnered a large number of supporters.

The charts below depict the generational distribution in the Parliament (Senate and Chamber of Deputies), county councils, and city halls in major cities.

Distribution of MPs, heads of county councils, and mayors in major cities, by generation and gender (number):

Generation X holds the policy power in the Parliament

Generation X is dominant in both chambers of the Romanian Parliament. The Chamber of Deputies was led by a Generation X majority in the last two rounds of general elections. In 2012 and 2016, Generation X had 49% of the total seats.

That being said, Millennials nearly doubled their presence in Parliament in the last general election compared to the previous legislature – despite the fact that turnout in 2020 was the lowest of the last three rounds of general elections, at 31.84%.

Women, regardless of generation, continue to be severely underrepresented. Only 19% of MPs in the current term are female.

Panorama extensively covered the emergence of the Millennial Generation in Parliament here.

Group the MPs by chamber, generation, and gender using the interactive chart below. Click/hover on the circles for the MP’s name.

A Flourish survey visualization – Counties are led by Generation Xers

2020 was unlike any election year. It brought a paradigm shift in terms of voter options. It was also most likely the year in which the younger generations were most vocal.

If young Millennials achieved a pinnacle of representativity in general elections following this electoral cycle, many old-timer leaders lost their influence in local elections after decades in office.

Marian Oprișan, the former president of the Vrancea county council for instance, was removed from power after a staggering 20 years in office. Cătălin Toma, who was 12 years younger than Oprişan, replaced him.

In Iași, Costel Alexe, a 39-year-old Millennial, succeeded Maricel Popa, a Baby Boomer who served as president of the county council from 2016 to 2020.

Maramureș county has the youngest county council president. Ionel Ovidiu Bogdan, who is 35 years of age, took over as county president after Gabriel Valer Zetea, a Generation Xer, completed his four-year tenure.

When we draw the line, 26 county councils (out of 41) are governed by Generation Xers, while just 4 are led by Millennials, but the difference is significant compared to previous elections, and it will continue to increase in the coming years.

In terms of gender representation, there are just two women who lead county councils, both of whom are Generation Xers.

More mayors are now Millennials

Immediately after the 2020 local elections, the media outlets debated extensively the number of town halls that, for the first time ever, were led by relatively young mayors. Of course, since then, some of them have been subject to criticism and not everyone was impressed by their performance. Some also see here a possible result of the high expectations people had when they voted for a completely new generation.

In 2020, a 25-year-old man defeated a mayor who had served for more than 20 years in Cenad, a commune in Timiș county. The youngest mayor in the history of Sibiu county was also elected in 2020, at the age of 29.

In comparison to previous election years, 2020 saw a record number of Millennials win an election – in many cases, they were significantly younger than their predecessors.

In total, seven Millennials presently serve as mayors in major Romanian cities (municipalities).

Bacău has the youngest mayor of any major city. Lucian Daniel Stanciu Viziteu was 36 years old when he was elected mayor of Bacău.

Other cities with mayors who were between the ages of 37 and 39 when they assumed office include Oradea, Piatra Neamț, Botoşani, Galaţi, Slatina, and Timișoara.

Generation X has 25 representatives as mayors for major cities, whereas Baby Boomers have only nine.

Generations of Romania. Economic power

Consumption patterns in Romania, like everywhere else, have evolved with the younger generations. Without a doubt, Millennials and Generation Z have impacted the retail market through differences in consumption when compared to previous generations, thus prompting manufacturers and sellers of goods and services to develop new loyalty and retention strategies.

Millennials make more money than Generation X in Romania, despite the fact that they are not yet the largest consumer group. The majority of this money is spent online.

The chart below shows and compares the gross monthly average income of the youngest and oldest members of each generation in 2020 (data source: National Institute of Statistics).

Millennials have the highest earnings

According to the National Institute of Statistics, 35-40-year-olds had the highest gross income in 2020. These groups of people are the early Millennial generation. It is also the age group with the largest income gap between men and women.

Romania actually ranks among the last places in European statistics in terms of the wage gap between women and men. What could cause such a low pay gap? One possible explanation is the fact that the labor market participation rate of women in Romania is among the lowest in the EU.

Men and women face wage disparities from the moment they enter the workforce.

Generation X, on the other hand, does not see such systematic differences between the income of women and men.  On the contrary, the wage gap is essentially non-existent.

As for the Baby Boomers, women eventually end up making more money than men of similar age just a few years before retirement.

Most entrepreneurs are Generation Xers

Except for Giurgiu and Gorj counties, where the majority of company owners and stockholders are Millennials, all other Romanian counties are dominated by Generation Xers.

Generation Z seems to have an entrepreneurial prowess, which is particularly prevalent in Bistrita Năsăud and Giurgiu, where 12% of shareholders and company owners are younger than 29 years old.

Covasna County is dominated by Baby Boomers. Here, 22% of shareholders and firm owners are over 60 years old, while another 22% are between 50 and 59 years old.

The graph below shows the age distribution of shareholders and company owners.

Young and elderly generations are the most vulnerable

The generations left outside the labor sphere, pensioners and children, are prone to the risk of poverty.

Romania ranks first in the European Union in terms of risk of poverty, with more than 35% of the population exposed to this danger.

Generations of Romania. What happened during the critical life phases for each generation

If we look at the strengths of each generation, things are apparently simple. Generation X is numerically dominating, younger generations are small and getting smaller, Millennials will soon dominate the political landscape, while they continue to have the highest incomes. Aside from the demographic, political, and economic profiles, each generation has its own set of behaviors and attitudes.

The environment in which each generation grew up, as well as the major events that impacted the childhood and adolescence phase of different age groups strongly influence these behaviors.

The infographics below show, comparatively, how Romania and the world changed and put an emphasis on when these changes were felt in the lives of different generations. We do this to better understand what kinds of attitudes could drive these changes.

Urbanization. Romanian Baby Boomers experienced the transition from rural to urban

The Baby Boomer generation grew up when three-quarters of the country’s population lived in villages. Only after the age of 40 did these Romanians find themselves in a country where the rate of urbanization exceeded 50%. With childhood and adolescence spent in the village, the first stage of their adulthood process took place in the background of Romania’s rapid industrialization. In such a setting, it was rather evident what they were going to do after graduating from school (assuming they went to school at all), because the cities were becoming major industrial hubs.

However, the following generations grew up in a much more urbanized Romania, with all the changes this implied to people’s way of life and career. Millennial children, on the other hand, grew up in an urbanized country, open to modern development.

Human rights. Generation Z was the first generation to live in a Romania where rights weren’t severely restricted

 Romania ranks last in Europe in terms of human rights and civil liberties during the Baby Boomer Generation’s childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. These Romanians grew up without knowing they had rights and freedoms, and even if they believed they did, it didn’t matter in the slightest. This made them more obedient citizens, who would relate differently to the state and institutions even after the fall of communism. It was after the age of 50 when they understood what it meant to have basic rights.

Millennials, on the other hand, grew up in a free society, guided by parents who had experienced and understood restrictions and limitations. They tried to explore for themselves the freedom of a democratic society free of oppression.

Generation Z is the first generation in Romania to have never lived a day under an authoritarian regime – with all that this means for human rights and the perception of the role within the state in the life of the citizen.

GDP per capita. Generation Z is coming of age in the most prosperous period in Romania’s history

As Panorama also demonstrated in this interactive material, Millennials and Generation Z are living in the most prosperous era in the country’s recorded history. Although they were caught up in the 2008 economic crisis, some of them were too young to be impacted in their own finances. The subsequent economic recovery coincided with the accelerated development of technology, which, for these generations, meant an increase in opportunities.