Cultural Resistance in Kyiv
Art Doesn’t Pause for War. It Fights Back
In Kyiv, cultural life hasn’t stopped. It’s been reconfigured into something raw, urgent, and defiant. As missiles fall and cultural sites are erased, artists continue to create.
Philosopher Leonardo Caffo and curator Sofia Baldi Pighi recently travelled to Kyiv, gathering testimonies from the literal and metaphorical underground. Theatres continue in bomb shelters. Clubs throb under curfews. Visual artists and performers document loss, raise funds, offer refuge, and reshape memory.
Their dispatches dismantle the Western habit of romanticising cultural endurance. What emerges instead is a hard truth: this is a war on identity. And Ukraine’s response is one of assertion, not victimhood.
Kyiv’s artists aren’t waiting for peace. They’re building the conditions for it under fire.
by Leonardo Coffo
How can you think when explosions surround you? In Kyiv, the normal and the abnormal exist side by side. Here, UNESCO has reported at least 670 destroyed cultural sites, including 145 religious and 238 of historical or artistic significance. On this investigative journey, we meet European intellectuals on the front lines. How can we bear witness to and share their reality?
by Sofia Baldi Pighi
In Kyiv, cultural life is flourishing despite the war. We explore the city through the eyes of artists, intellectuals, researchers, curators, cultural workers, and poets who have stayed behind. Some say it feels like the «new Berlin.» Here, artists are neither commentators nor observers: they create bonds, build networks, tell small stories, and provide a means of cohesion.
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