To Make Yourself Invisible

3According to Lagushonkova’s war manual – taken here, of course, in ironic parenthesis by putting it in the mouth of a chorus of psychologists, most probably men – the only way to avoid the destructive power of rape is to try to separate the body and the affective sphere. To make the body a symbolic shelter, and thus – to be able to survive. Faced with the cruelty of this kind of violence and the possible strategies to “minimize losses,” we are confronted here with the question: what does it mean to survive? Is survival inscribed, as it were, a priori, in the subsequent rebirth? And is not the potentiality of rape itself a form of violence that turns the world into a hostile place in which, in order to survive, one must make oneself as invisible as possible, disappear from sight?

If rape cannot be prevented and you are not sure whether you're able to put up a fight, try to “freeze” inside and out. The rapist isn’t interested in sex but in proving his power over you, he wants to humiliate and degrade you. Active resistance on the part of a victim will spark and feed sadistic behavior. Therefore, the woman might be exposed to more pain and suffer genital and bodily injuries.
CHORUS: Advice from psychologists:
Repeat to yourself: “This is only my body, my soul is bigger, stronger, it cannot be possessed. I am 1000 times greater than my body. It’s just a body.”
- Important: do not allow yourself to feel guilty. The rapist is to blame, the occupier is to blame.
If possible, perform basic hygiene. But don’t risk your life to fetch a bucket of water from a well that is under fire.
- Most importantly: do not allow yourself to feel guilty. The rapist is to blame, the occupier is to blame.
If you're in pain, use household antiseptics: a solution of baking soda (1 teaspoon per 0.5 liters of water), plain clean water, alcohol-free wet wipes for children, Triderm ointment, Levomekol ointment, Triacutan ointment, Bepanthen ointment. You can use Chlorhexidine once. Also regular hand cream, if you have any.
Remember: The rapist is to blame, the occupier is to blame. Do not allow yourself to feel guilty.
Do not use antiseptics or wipes containing alcohol, hydrogen peroxide, Panthenol, oil, or other greasy products.
- Important: do not allow yourself to feel guilty. The rapist is to blame, the occupier is to blame.
If you are of reproductive age, the risk of unwanted pregnancy is high, especially on day 6 to 16 of your menstrual cycle. For emergency contraception, take 0.1 mg of ethinylestradiol (i.e. 5 tablets of 0.02 mg or 4 tablets of 0.025 mg, or 2 tablets of 0.03 and 0.035 mg), and no less than 0.5 mg of Levonorgestrel. Repeat the dose after 12 hours.
This contraception is most effective if used within the first 24 to 72 hours after unprotected sex.
Remember: The rapist is to blame, the occupier is to blame. Do not allow yourself to feel guilty.
As soon as you have the opportunity, see a psychologist and a doctor, and get tested for sexually transmitted diseases.
Do not allow yourself to feel guilty. The rapist is to blame, the occupier is to blame.
Were you taking notes?

Constructing Shelter

7Yet another experience that Lagushonkova evokes, and which is very literally related with “survival,” is living in a shelter or, to be more precise, seeking and constructing a safe shelter from bombs. The instruction manual is broken down in this scene of the drama into a series of sentences-advice spoken by specific refugee actresses:

If you cannot go to a shelter, stay at home. (Olena)
The safest place in your flat is between two solid walls: the first wall will take the impact, the second will shield you from any debris. (Żenia N.)
Do not take shelter in stairwells, under arcades or on escape stairs. (Asia)
If you’re caught under a collapsed wall, don't try to take it apart by yourself. Wait for professional help. (Aliona)
Take down all mirrors and any doors with glass elements and lay them on the floor. Cover them with blankets. (Olena)
Tape up the windows. (Żenia N.)

8In fact, this is a manual that helps to turn one’s own home into a shelter – at the same time, it makes us realize that shelter often still needs to be constructed. Here, Lagushonkova touches on a theme that emerged strongly after February 24, 2022: the topic of adapting private spaces for warfare recurs in photographs and media reports from Ukraine (especially in the first weeks of the war). One of the many images appearing on social media showed, for example, a window of a house in Kyiv that had been very tightly, completely draped with books: they had been treated as protective material over the glass that had been shattered during the bombing. This is typical of a wartime disaster situation: objects change their function – some turn out to be useless or suddenly become a lethal threat, others are necessary, gaining new functions. The use of objects, space and the bodies placed in it becomes something subject to metamorphosis, negotiable, performative. The same ambivalence and oscillation is inscribed in the very notion of home: in a situation of war, its familiar space is both the safest shelter and a place constantly threatened with destruction, which can suddenly – in the blink of an eye – turn into our own tomb.

9However, it seems possible to try to look at the problem of shelter construction in the broader context defined by the notion of crisis. “If you can’t go to a shelter, stay at home”: the COVID-19 pandemic (with the slogan “Stay at home!” recurring like a mantra), the war in Ukraine and the migrant crisis that hit Europe with such force in the middle of the previous decade put the primary anthropological function of the home back in focus – as a place of survival in which the fragility and contingency of life is simultaneously revealed. Perhaps it is this intuition linking habitation with impermanence and anxiety that lies at the root of a number of art projects in recent years redefining the notion of home/shelter.

10The interest in impermanent architecture (as identified with that made by migrants) gains its most recognizable material dimension in Rebecca Belmore’s work Biinjiya’iing Onji [From inside], made especially for documenta 14 in Athens (2017). She prepared a sculpture in the form of a marble tent, which stood on the Filopappou Hill located opposite the Acropolis. Belmore reverses the meanings in a perverse way: something impermanent acquires the characteristics of permanence, a nomadic, usually fast-disappearing temporary shelter is immortalized, elevated to the status of a contemporary “antiquity” – it becomes a fossil of contemporary history, something that survives and in which, as it were, a preposterous look from the future is inscribed. The Canadian artist’s work draws attention to the impermanent, ephemeral nature of contemporary shelters: they often remain invisible to the gaze. Again, there is a double movement: on one hand, those who temporarily inhabit them try to make them and themselves as invisible as possible, try to disappear from view (their survival may depend on it); on the other hand, these places and their inhabitants are permanently made invalid by the power and associated imperial history (as meaningless and therefore unworthy to survive and to be seen). Belmore gives the work a title that directs us to the relationship of the gaze and invisibility: From Inside. There is no one in the empty marble tent, yet it is giving a glimpse from within. History written from the point of view of the powerless, the “insignificant,” the deprived of rights and visibility remains to be written.

11The theme of the impermanence of shelter is also echoed by Dutch photographer Henk Wildschut, who between 2009 and 2016 documented the so-called “Jungle,” a temporary migrant town that grew up on the outskirts of Calais and which, in 2016, at the moment of its greatest growth, is being demolished by a decision of the local authorities. Wildschut has created two series of photographs, Shelter (2010) and Ville de Calais (2016) – the first dedicated to the architecture of migrant shelters, the second already a full documentation of life in the “Jungle of Calais.” It focuses on the construction of living space as a gesture of survival. The inhabitants have to constantly renew their efforts to make their space “domesticated”: it is periodically destroyed by the authorities (which makes their efforts almost Sisyphean), and at the same time these attempts seem to be a form that allows them to survive – necessary in the face of the biopolitics of the state of emergency that is stripping them of meaning.

12Wildschut photographs, for example, the gardens created next to the migrants’ “houses,” a kind of “micro-Edens” – some of which have only survived a few days. It is also worth noting the performative dimension of these gestures: the shelters are subject to constant construction and deconstruction, the materials are reused, the use of space is something that is subject to transformation. For the author himself, this draws parallels with children’s practices of constantly establishing and transforming domestic space and building shelters during play. The surprising book Huts, Temples, Castles (2022) by German photographer Ursula Schulz-Dornburg can also be recalled in this context. It is a series of photographs of the experimental playground Jongensland in the suburbs of Amsterdam, which existed from 1948 until the late 1970s; the photographs were taken in 1969. The entire area, which was heavily isolated from the outside world, was put at the disposal of children as a play space – over the years a micro-town consisting of temporary children’s shelters, built from whatever the little builders had at hand, had grown up there.

The Anachronism of the Shelter

14In contrast to the ephemeral shelters discussed here is the nuclear bomb shelter – an example of typical wartime architecture, a true “survival machine.” Ukrainian artist Mykola Ridnyi’s 2013 video work Shelter shows a Cold War-era underground shelter in Kharkiv, where defense training and weapons handling exercises take place. The guide to this enclosed underground micro-world is a retired teacher – the caretaker of the place and at the same time the embodiment of the old Soviet ideology. In one of his statements, he outlines a kind of theory of the shelter:

Shelters are installations that protect those inside from adverse factors such as nuclear, chemical or biological warfare, as well as high temperatures and fire-related factors. In addition, the shelter must have a living room. This room must be equipped with chairs, benches and bunks so that adults can sit and those who are sick and children can lie down. This room must have a kind of manned post to supervise the behavior of those inside. There must also be an emergency exit so that people can get out if the primary entry/exit points are blocked by debris. No more shelters are currently being built in Kharkiv and existing ones are being sealed.

15In contrast to temporary shelters, which depend on the creativity of their maker, Cold War-era shelters were therefore created according to a clear pattern, in a way that would ensure survival. The overriding principle is functionality: there are no superfluous things in it, every position of the body is already planned in advance and is intended to increase the chances of survival. At the same time, the shelter is here a figure of the militarization of space, a fear of war fueled by propaganda and, perhaps above all, an escape from the real world. Ridnyi’s work is based on the contrast between past and present, theory and practice: when the film was made, the threat of war seemed distant, while the shelter had become an anachronistic place in its own way, deprived of its original function, a relic (survival) of a different order. At the same time, the film very quickly gained, preposterously, a new meaning: since 2014, the possibility of reusing these spaces in the context of a potential military threat began to be recreated in cities in eastern Ukraine. The Russian invasion in February 2022 realized these fears – underground life became an important part of the experience of the inhabitants of this part of the world once again. Shelters have become not only places of hiding, but also places of creation – these activities are sometimes intertwined. For example, this was the case with Yermilov Centre in Kharkiv – an important contemporary art gallery located in the basement of the local university, on the site of a former shelter. For the first two weeks of the war (we should remember: Kharkiv was on the front line at the time), people were hiding in this space and there was an interventionist exhibition How Are You?:

• 14 https://www.textezurkunst.de/en/articles/alisa-lozhkina-we-are-only-seen-when-we-die/, accessed Jan (...)

Banal everyday photos and videos document the life of the artists in the gallery, which for two weeks was turned into a bomb shelter. People watch films, cover windows with protective shields, eat, sleep, and have long conversations. It looks like some awkward indoor picnic, but endless explosions can be heard. The gallery is located in the heart of the city, in the basement of a constructivist building at Kharkiv’s Karazin University. By an ironic twist of fate, these are the areas of Kharkiv that have been most affected by the bombing. The curators of How Are You? emphasize that these photos are the documentation of a performance. Referring to Ilya Kabakov’s immersive artworks, they call the gallery turned into a bomb shelter a “total installation.”14

17In another video Father’s Story (2012), Mykola Ridnyi again explores the space of the underground: we see the basement of the family home, hear the artist’s voice guiding us through this rarely visited place, which served as a food storage space and which, in the event of war, would act as a private shelter with a reinforced concrete structure. “People who remembered the war would store various products here” to then “come here and eat like animals.” The cellar is therefore overflowing with old preserves – a mass of jars dating back to the last decade of the USSR and the 1990s, the time of political transformation. At the same time, the cellar is a place long unvisited and unused: it becomes a kind of “sideways branch lines of time,” an anachronistic space. Everything is covered with old Soviet newspapers, serving as protection from dust and water. Never-opened jams, salads, lard, pickles and moonshine become here a kind of inhuman survivors, persisting persistently despite the change of historical epoch and epistemological paradigm.

18In the case of both of Ridnyi’s works, the underground world is presented as a space of post-imperial nostalgia, a relic of a time when the fear of nuclear annihilation was alive and the need to organise one's own survival was an everyday experience. The shelter and the basement become a form of tomb in which unwanted memories are deposited (which is particularly topical today, when many Ukrainians are asking themselves what to do with the memory after the USSR, in the face of the need to decolonise imperial culture), an inner space which, like our memory, is made up of different layers of temporality and where material remnants of another era survive.

19What survives then appears as a form of anachronism of time. Aby Warburg’s concept of the posthumous life of Antiquity and the related term Nachleben are worth mentioning here. It refers to the “survival” or “survivance” of forms and images, a deep visual cultural memory not subject to changes in artistic or cultural style and paradigm. This notion, so central to all Warburgian thinking, derives from nineteenth-century evolutionism, Anglo-American anthropology and from cultural scholars such as Edward B. Tylor. As Georges Didi-Huberman notes:

• 16 Georges Didi-Huberman, Image survivante: histoire de l’art et temps des fantômes selon Aby Warburg (...)

Nachleben is for Warburg what makes historical time impure [...]. In Warburg’s understanding, the surviving form does not triumphantly relive the death of its competitors. On the contrary, it experiences, symptomatically and spectrally, its own death: it disappears at a certain point in history, only to reappear again, at a moment when we probably do not expect it [...]. Nachleben can, from this point of view, be compared to the models of time which, in evolutionary theory, form a symptom, i.e. an obstacle to all continuous and linear patterns of adaptation. Evolutionary theorists spoke of “living fossils,” those perfectly anachronistic forms of survival. [...] Warburg’s Nachleben, however, does not tell us about “living fossils” or “backward” forms. It tells us about heterochronies.16

20Against Tylor and the evolutionists, for Warburg what survives is thus not strong enough, but rather adequately weak in order to be able to disappear and appear, to exist in a spectral way. Weakness seems to be the paradoxical but necessary condition for survival.

Between the Living and the Dead

21Shelters are, it is worth repeating once again, also places of execution and particular types of violence – removing oneself from sight in order to make oneself invisible to the oppressor(s) facilitates, under certain circumstances, the hiding of traces of the violence and thus the double invalidation of the victim. This regularity can be clearly seen in the media coverage of Bucza, Irpien and Hostomel (taking into account the as yet unexplored nature and scale of the crimes committed there and the incomplete access to information – surely the “Bucza effect” remains a chapter for researchers and artists to write as well). In those sub-Kyivan villages occupied by Russian troops at the very beginning of the invasion, much of the drama took place in the cellars and basements of houses – out of sight not only of bystanders, but often also their neighbours. The inhabitants usually chose to hide in these places in order to wait and survive. At the same time, in some cases, the shelters turned into their tombs: some cellars turned into places of execution, where people were killed and raped. The bodies of those killed usually remained for days afterwards among the living or had to be left in the streets: burial became something extremely dangerous in those days.

27Perhaps to complete the image of the shelter is to see it as a place of mediation with the dead: through death potentially inscribed in every attempt to avoid it, to hide from it. The gaze coming from this place would thus inevitably focus on what escapes us on a daily basis: the frightening precariousness of life.