Disturbed
Ground

Kyiv’s ∄ and Berlin’s CTM Festival are launching Disturbed Ground, a collaborative project that attempts to respond to war’s ecological impacts in Ukraine by presenting audiovisual works and discursive formats in dialogue with researchers. At the core are two new commissioned works created by pairing Ukrainian and European artists undo despot, Zeynep Schilling, Khrystyna Kirik, Mark Bain, and alen hast + myk rudik of u2203 studio. The project is co-curated by Mariana Berezovska, CTM Festival, ∄, and alen hast from u2203 studio, and supported by Goethe-Institut. Disturbed Ground builds on previous artistic investigations held at ∄ in autumn 2024 under the title, Echoes of the Earth. Kicking off Disturbed Ground, the artists spent one week in June working on-site at ∄’s creative and tech production space, u2203 studio, engaging in dialogue with researchers investigating the environmental impact of russia’s full-scale invasion — from contaminated water systems to land torn by constant military strikes. The curatorial idea emerged from a desire to explore how we can engage with war-torn ecologies not just as political topics or statistics, but as living systems carrying memory, trauma, and meaning, and how art can play a role in expanding our relationships to realities that are difficult and painful to grasp and engage with. By working across disciplines — sound, video, architecture, science, and storytelling — each artist pairing seeks to propose new ways of sensing and relating to ecocide that reach beyond data and maps, and into the sensorial and affective. These works are a call to consider our relationship with land, waters, and ecologies – asking how we might listen to distressed landscapes or localities not only through the lens of destruction, but as sites still resonating and transforming. Following this work-in-progress presentation at ∄, the works will be previewed at an event organised with the Ukrainian Institute in Berlin on 12 July 2025. The works will then be further developed for their full Berlin premiere at CTM Festival in early 2026, before returning to Kyiv later that year.