Follow the Fellow #10

Dark days are back. In Berlin and in Kyiv, though darkness has a somewhat different quality in each city. In Berlin, it’s depressingly dark and miserable, foggy but clean. In Kyiv it’s snowing, the streets are full of dirty slush, the sky is overcast, with occasional drones and rockets falling. Streetlights in Berlin are dim and scarce at night. In Kyiv, they seem brighter — unless there’s a blackout. Ironically (not really), the illumination problem in both cities has the same cause.

In November, Kyiv gets 17 minutes more daylight than Berlin. Somehow that feels like a huge difference. 17 minutes is a long time — four times more than it would take an intercontinental ballistic missile, like the one Russia sent to Dnipro, to fly from occupied Crimea to Berlin.

Kyiv and Berlin are both very close and extremely distant. Just as it used to take a little over two hours to fly from one city to the other and it now takes around twenty by land if you’re lucky, so it sometimes feels like we live in the same space until it doesn’t. When I’m at a sold-out concert such as the recent Kiezsalon we organized with Digital in Berlin or tvvo:id at Klangwerkstatt Berlin, listening to Ukrainian musicians sharing the stage with their German colleagues like they always belonged together, I can’t stop wondering why Ukrainians have to keep asking the German government to »free Taurus« on the 1000th day of the full-scale invasion just as they did over a year ago when I arrived here.     

With dark days back, we may not have another thousand to stand up against this evil alone.

~

Tetiana Khoroshun is a Ukrainian composer of acoustic and electroacoustic music, sound installations, music for performances, cinema, and computer games born in Crimea.

Tetiana created »pin_drop,« performed here by The Acousmatic Project, as part of the masterclasses that Albert Saprykin and Mykhailo Chedryk (featured in FtF before), my colleagues from Kyiv Contemporary Music Days, organized with the Ukrainian Institute in Vienna in 2019. Ukrainian Institute is how I met Albert and Mykhailo and how I ended up in KCMD — so, in a way, it is responsible for me being here in Berlin right now.

Yet another reminder of how connected we really are.

»Follow the Fellow« is made possible as part of the Weltoffenes Berlin fellowship program of the Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Gesellschaftlichen Zusammenhalt.