「Spomyny」――戦時下のウクライナの家族との通話を体験する没入型インスタレーション

The Voices of VR Podcast. installation artist that is talking around communication during a time of war. So Sofia Bogakova, she's a Ukrainian artist, but actually moved away when she was 16. And so a lot of her experience of Ukraine has been through digital communications and communicating with friends and family over text and conversations with them. And so when the war broke out, she kind of found herself glued to her phone. And at any moment, she could get information that would derail her day. And so she ended up creating this whole, like, immersive art installation with, like, these really long tubes that have lights on the end.

And so she ended up capturing these audio dispatches that are put in those tubes. And so you basically walk into this room with, like, 13 different tubes. You stick the tube up to your ear, and you're kind of listening like an old game of telephone. But every 20 minutes or so, all the audio sort of shuts off, and you basically have these sirens. the sirens that also go off as warning for some sort of incoming story for the war a warning for people to take cover because it's no longer safe and so it's a piece that is focusing on the different dimensions of communication audio narration that is happening from her own experience but also pulling in from other audio clips and also a diary from someone who lived in maria paul which was all sorts of horrendous war crimes that were happening there and so you get first person narrative of some of the stuff that we don't really actually have a lot of information otherwise for what was happening in Mary Paul during the war. This is a piece that I'd say is the elemental genre of air earth air because there is a lot of speaking and talking and you're listening to these

communication with family members during wartime so a lot of it is coming through words but also the kind of immersive installation component where so much of the experience is going into this place with all this kind of cacophony of sounds coming in and just the sensory experience of sticking something up to your ear to discern different audio bits. I think there was overall around six hours of audio within the context of this installation, and I was able to hear maybe 45 minutes of it or so. So, we're covering all that and more on today's episode of Voices of VR Podcast. So, this interview with Sophia happened on Friday, September 4th, 2026, at Venice Immersive in Venice, Italy. So, with that, let's go ahead and dive right in. Hello, my name is Sofia Bulgakova. I'm a Ukrainian media artist and art scientist, how I call myself, as I studied art science. And I work with immersive installations and performances, and I vary between analog virtual realities, sound and visceral experiences, and virtual reality itself.

Great, and maybe you could give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into the space. I'm Ukrainian. I studied sculpture in Ukraine, and then I moved to London for a year and studied photography and time-based media. and I always wanted to do film directing, and then I realized that it's very conventional and boring, so I wanted to expand into something else, and then ended up doing my bachelor's in The Hague in the Netherlands in an interfaculty called Art Science, which is in between the Royal Academy of Arts and Royal Conservatory there, and it's very much rooted into the audiovisual, electronic music, all kinds of experimental media art, and media art, very old-school media art, and then from there I moved through spaces and ended up in immersive and virtual reality, festivals. Nice, maybe you could give a bit more context to Spomony, if I'm pronouncing that correctly, and what the experience and story you wanted to tell. So I'm presenting a work, it's called Spomony, and it's a Ukrainian word for memories, or also can be memoirs, and it's an audio piece, which consisting out of almost one kilometer of insulation piping,

which I work as sound conduit, so each pipe of 50 meters are connected to a speaker source, which is a collection of Ukrainian testimonies and general civilian life capture from the beginning of invasion 2022. And it's an ongoing archive, so it consists out of my personal stories and I work as a kind of main narrator, which tells very personal short stories from the first day of invasion, which is 24th February 2022. And the rest is also, this is kind of the beginning date and it's ongoing. So it's field recordings, it's voice messages to each other from chats, of friends and people who share it. It's content from Telegram group chats, which Ukrainians use as a news source when something is flying, when there's an air raid, they exchange information, which is much quicker. And also, you cannot really share visual material fast after the attacks, but you can share sound. So there's a lot of voice note recordings in these group chats. Then it's a lot of TikToks or Instagram material, which people shared in the beginning of the vision.

And then in the latest edition, it's also experts or diary of a woman who passed away in Mariupol. And then there's a civilian organization in Ukraine which preserved the diary and published it as a book. And this is the translation of it, which is also partially in the work. Can you talk a bit about where you were when the war first broke out? So it's in the work as well, but as I live a long time abroad, not in Ukraine, I left when I was 16 to study. And I was in Lisbon in Portugal. And I was doing another show with a different piece, obviously. It was not existing yet. And I was getting really, really stressed out two days before when everything was kind of starting to go down. And then that was also one of the stories that I wake up at like three o'clock in the morning from lots of text messages. And then the first thing I do, I call my friend who's calling me the most. And then that's how also the work starts. It starts with like I called Regina and I tell the time and this is what happens. It's kind of what's how it puts it in motion. So basically what part of the work as well, as I was not in Ukraine when it started,

it's a lot of phone calls and kind of phone communication. with somebody who is in Ukraine who is experiencing it firsthand, and I'm kind of reflecting on it from a bit of a distance, which is also an interesting part of the work, and you listen to it as like this kind of old-school childhood phone game, and I'm constantly talking about being on the phone, and while you're holding this is also kind of part of the layer of this, which evolves in the work. Yeah, and so I'm curious, when you had the idea that this would become a piece of work, was it almost immediately that you knew that you were going to do something with all these recordings? So the material itself, for example, of the insulation pipes came before the invasion started. So in 2018, we're still studying, and we were working in Amsterdam in a shipyard in a ship repairment. And they used this kind of piping for outside cables, for power cables, so not water, not to damage it. And at the same time, inside the docks, they used walkie-talkies for communication, so it sounds like these broken voice pieces. and third layer was that most of the workers were men who came for seasonal work from odesta that's

where i'm from in ukraine so it was a lot of mixed ukrainian with some kind of local communication which is kind of out of place for amsterdam talking through walkie talk is for you kind of you hear something which not everybody understands i do but somebody doesn't and it's kind of the soundscape of this dock which kind of resonated with me a lot so i had this material and then i worked with pipes as sound conduits since then but then mostly for kind of spatial understanding or some kind of tests and then the invasion started I started collecting a lot of material and it was kind of also like this notes on like phone notes which I was kind of voiced in the work were kind of like a way how to deal with it and then social media in the very beginning of invasion like Instagram became a big thing for Ukrainian community to find each other very quickly or like to find external help very quickly so there was a lot of stories where people were sharing a lot and this kind of written stories and this is kind of an auditory version of that. And then the work presented in Venice as the best of experiences which premiered before and premiered for a festival in the Hague called

Rewire. Originally it was a commission for them and instrument inventors initiative which I have an opportunity to propose something to them and I propose like what if we actually take all these recordings I have on this ongoing archive from the beginning of Invasion and bring it into this kind of visceral form through this piping. So we did this and then the work traveled with a different kind of updated version to Ars Electronica last year. From the beginning of Invasion they have this new prize called State of the Artist which focuses on media artworks in the political scape. And this was an honorary mention that was created in the main exhibition last year and now it's here. So it's kind of life of its own and then every time I show it, of course it changes very much how it looks and how it sounds because of the acoustics of the space and it's very space adaptive because it's insulation pipes in buildings and it's also a bit archive so it's kind of gets more and more material yeah i had asked you how much total runtime it was and you said it's around six hours or so total and i think there's like 20 minute slots and i went to three different slots and heard probably around 45 minutes to an hour or so but even at that i

heard some stuff like multiple times and so like i feel like i was only able to kind of dip into the archive, but it's a pretty vast archive. And so, yeah, maybe just talk around the total size of it now and how long it is, but also how many individual pipes you have where you could listen to. So in this version, what I try to do, this work is modular. So it exists in this kind of installation boxes with two speakers each. And now in the space, there's three installation boxes with six channels. I can either do less or more. It depends on the space and kind of the capacity of the building. and this version is 13 pipes so it's 13 times 50 meters they're all connected one by one kind of vacuum sealed 3d printed models on the speakers itself so it shoots sound through 50 meters of pipe which makes it very fun and makes it very funny way how to calibrate it and how to actually make it hearable and it's also kind of the quality of it what kind of a lot of frequencies get lost and then something else appears.

And then now each channel is about maybe 45 minutes total of material. And then it's synchronized in a way that they run simultaneously and then we run kind of an algorithmic system that every X amount of minutes everything starts to be a siren. So it disrupts the stories every now around 18-20 minutes it would be. So around the time slot-esque, plus minus. So how it would be daily life in Ukraine, that siren disrupts whatever you're doing and you need to react and respond, it does the same in the work. So whatever you're listening to, suddenly you have a siren and then all the channels go into sirens. So kind of listening to individual pipe becomes irrelevant for two minutes and then you're just there with the presence of the siren from Ukraine, which is there every day. I was there, I came from Ukraine to Venice and the day when I was leaving to Venice, the siren was in Odessa, I think, seven times it was per day. So every half an hour it would start again. was very continuous so it's kind of very reminiscent of what's happening here when you keep hearing it

throughout the space yeah i've heard from people that when they hear the siren it sort of triggers us back into that state and i'm from indiana united states and there's tornado sirens and when i was back home there's like the tornado siren and then my parents were just kind of like watching the tv to see if it was closed or not and then it wasn't and so they were fine but i was I was kind of like panicked in a way of like hypervigilant being aware. And so, yeah, I thought that was really quite impactful to hear the break in because I'd be listening to something and the whole room would be resonating with the sirens. And so, yeah, I'm just curious to like what it's like for you to hear that, decontextualize from that. But if it is something that really evokes a lot of those memories. I have to first comment on your story about the Indiana sirens. And that's what actually also happens when you're in Ukraine, at least what I experienced. You're like, okay, siren, what flies towards me? Ah, it's far, whatever. As soon as I'm outside of Ukraine and I'm in Amsterdam, for example, I hear about something is happening. I get so stressed out and I get really vigilant about like what is where and everybody's okay.

And it lasted me much longer when I'm in Ukraine. I'm like, okay, I'm alive, whatever. Continue. So I can feel it very much how you describe it. It's like, ah, it's not towards the side, whatever. and secondly the siren which is specifically in this work i recorded it i think a year ago a bit more maybe when i was developing it inside my bedroom in kiev my bedroom in kiev and my family apartment is in the very top floors on eighth floor and then it's in the very city center of kiev where my down is like this main square so there's a siren source very close by so it's very prominent and it has a very specific of course they're all similar but the kind of the rhythmics are different. So it's that specific siren, which I recorded and we used in work. And I got so used to it being part of the artwork. Then I was back home in Kiev and the siren started. I was like, who turned on my work? Why is the computer on? Like what's happening? I was like, oh no, it's the actual thing. I need to check what's happening. So I so detached from it now, like this particular sound, it became something totally different. But then of course, it's, it is still very reminiscent and it's like very real, but sirens sound differently everywhere.

But I have to say, because I grew up in Ukraine, like after the collapse of the Soviet Union, I'm from 1997, so I was born already after. I never experienced siren as something of a danger until five years ago. And then I live in Amsterdam in the Netherlands first Monday of every month at 12 o exactly they test sirens And for me it always was like it like once a month you hear a siren it never was kind of a sign of danger until in 2023 an invasion already started and i went to ukraine for the first time and experienced for like a month where that means something completely different then i came back and it was like first month of the month i forgot about it i was standing in a kitchen and i remember that what it does to your body to know that like that your body starts to get so agitated because it knows it can mean danger, like immediate, that this context of a siren generally in space really changes for you when you experience something like this. And I think for a lot of people it is, especially I always try to put warning signs of this work for siren, because for people who experience it ever in their life as something like a sign of something can happen,

it's very traumatic and can stay very traumatic even though years pass. I had it with people from Serbia, for example, who experienced 1991 in Belgrade, that for them is still very present. Yeah, I could definitely, I've heard that, and I feel from my own experience of just having recently had like a tornado siren, I can definitely understand that. One question around translating the content, because I heard a number of different pieces where it sounded like you speaking, but maybe in I statements, and sometimes it was like, I didn't know if that was your story, or also if you're taking other stuff from other diary entries, and if you are also reading those out and also having everything in the universal eye. So, yeah, just curious to hear a little bit how you are delineating the sourcing from each of these different things, and if you're only speaking about your own story when you say I, and how you demarcate where some of these other stories may be coming in. Yeah, that was one of the things where I was listening to it, and I knew I was going to be talking to you,

but I had trouble sometimes, as I'm dipping in and out, knowing whether or not this was your story or whether it was you just reading other people's stories? So every time it's my voice and say, I, it's about me personally, or I reflect on something which happens to somebody else, but from a personal perspective. And this is kind of a deliberate choice. Every time I say I, I feel something or I experience something, it's about me. And then there are a few English voices which are not on our stage. They're mostly either vlogs of somebody posting online or text messages to each other. These are other people and it's their own eye. And the diary is read by a Ukrainian actress, Daria Tvaranovich. And it was a deliberate choice because Katarina, whose diary it is, passed away in Mariupol. So she couldn't voice it, so somebody had to. And I couldn't do it because my eye and who I am is already in the work and it's a big part of the work. And for me, it has to be somebody who the audience would believe it could be Katarina. so it's specifically a Ukrainian actress

with Ukrainian accent and English quite intense one and specifically way of how it would be kind of maybe not always 100% understandable because of the accent but then it still makes more sense for me than having somebody with a perfect way of saying this story but then it doesn't feel the integrity of who this person was what happened but every time there is I and then you hear me it's about me and then they're kind of so conceptually there's what I said there's three big moments when it's I either talk to somebody in Ukraine on the phone wherever I am I'm in conversation family friends or somebody they either I'm going to Ukraine so I'm in this transition of like arriving or I'm in I'm in Ukraine if something happens yeah yeah that makes sense yeah I think I heard a lot of the eyes and sometimes I could discern your voice and not always differentiate if I go back and listen again then I'll be able to discern that a little bit more. Maybe you could talk a little bit around the diary and this time period that's being documented in Mariupol and kind of like the arc of why that was so compelling in terms of like

a first-person account of what was happening in Mariupol. So in preparation for Venice, we were looking for additional partners and generally I always wanted to work with a bigger archive, which are people who work in Ukraine who have bigger capacity to collect stories. I'm one person and I even live abroad and I try my best, but it's a different scope of what you can do. And then there's an organization called Museum of Civilian Voices, and they do it from before the invasion. It collects stories from 2014 until now from people surviving occupation. So people who survived occupation, who left. And they have more than 145,000 accounts. Because, as you know, the conflict in Ukraine started 2014 with the protests in Kiev, which then stated into the impeachment of the president and the Russia occupying Donetsk and Lugansk, part, so the eastern part, annexation of Crimea. And there's a lot of territories which people left because they couldn't be in this occupation, they couldn't be in this annexation. So who could live and believe in this left? And of course, with the beginning of 2022, there's

a lot of territories which are forcefully occupied. So they collect testimonies of people, which is very important. They also collect it for international court for proof of war crimes. So that also happens, and this is part of a lot of organizations in Ukraine which try to preserve this. So it's important to, I believe that this I accounts or like this very personal narratives can resonate more with international audience more than very dry news or like this oversituation of violent imagery of violent news of what's happening. Then you understand this very, very personal accounts of people. It resonates much deeper and much closer to whatever is happening. And next to all of this, but conceptually the work, this particular work Spomane starts on the first day of invasion in 2022. So we would ever even, they had a very big account. We decided that this cannot be included in the work as it's from before 2022 from invasion. And maybe it's more resonating if we ever do Ukrainian version of the work. This composition doesn't work, but maybe specifically the accounts from that archive work.

But they had the diary, which Mariupol is a city which was very quickly when invasion started. it's a city on the Azov Sea, which is very close to the Russian border. And it was very quickly occupied, and it was basically destroyed to nothing and occupied. So now it's under Russia. And Russia doesn't allow for death count, so it's an occupied territory, and they don't allow UN in. So there's no official numbers of deaths, but if this city was one million, it's more than 100,000 people dead. So the organization which I'm talking about, the Museum of Selian Voices, they had a diary of one of the civilian women who worked in one of the steelworks factories in Mariupol who documents her life from the first day of invasion in like a written form in a diary. And the diary lasts for 34 days. So it starts on the 24th February 2022 and it ends around, I think, 2nd of April 2022. And it ends with her husband passing away and she's very badly wounded

and she ends up in the hospital where she dies. And her teenage daughter and her mother find her in the hospital. She passes away, but they manage to escape. They survive and they manage to escape and they take the diary out with them. So this organization published a diary in Ukrainian, now as a book. And then, yeah, they try to integrate it or also spread it as this kind of very much personal eye of these accounts. And you also see it in a diary. So it's numbered by day one, day two, day before, and it has specific dates. And you see how very familiar and normal life disintegrates into something very horrific. And you can see it also, you can hear it in the work that water disappears, gas disappears, light disappears. Everything kind of becomes very survivalist and very scary. People have no internet, no connection, and it kind of progresses into wars and wars and wars and wars until there's no more record anymore because she passes away. And because this territory is occupied,

there's a lot of material out of it, also very little. Also, there was a film which won Best Documentary Film and Oscars two years ago, which is 20 Days in Mariupol, which is accounts of professional journalists which by chance of, I don't know how, professionalism and luck and everything managed to document 20 days of being there during the siege and leave the footage. through the occupying territory. I saw that at Sundance a couple years ago when it premiered, and it was a heart-wrenching but really incredible account and storytelling of just documenting and bearing witness to all the war crimes. Exactly. So it's direct documentation of war crimes of journalists who managed to do it, and it's incredible, but it's only one film. The amount of stories and what happened in the city throughout these months of occupation is insane, So whenever we have another voice, even with the person who passed away already, I think it's important to have the documentation. And again, as we talk in this whole work, and I think a lot of my practice is diverting from individual eye into kind of a bigger storytelling,

or like which can resonate to others. And the same, it's important to document Ukraine, and I'm Ukrainian, and I talk from that. But it's also, we're living in 1026 with a lot of conflicts happening at the same time. And these stories, which are this specific to Ukraine, but happens in many more places. And this is horrific. So I kind of also try to pan it in between kind of documenting where I'm from, what's happening, but also highlighting this kind of necessity of documenting it everywhere else, where these kind of war crimes are unfolding. Yeah, I'm curious to hear you elaborate a little bit on your iterations and development of this installation version with these installation tubes. So at the end of them, you have lights that are also like, you know, they can be a bit intense or hot, or it's a type of experience where it isn't always necessarily comfortable to sit there and hold it and have this kind of heat source. And I definitely appreciated the content, but there was also like a mirroring of the uncomfortable nature of the topic of the content

with the actual visceral experience of how you consume the content. So just curious to hear a bit more around your development of this sculptural installation for how you want to take this content and make it more of an immersive experience. So because it's kind of happened in the same time. So there's like there was a form and what I wanted to do with it and then content developed separately. And then you can present content as a podcast, for example, or as an audio piece, which is a different thing. I would curate it differently than how it is now in installation. and inflation allows it for this kind of spatial representation of what sometimes happens in all of our heads. It's like everything happens at the same time or this kind of oversaturation of everything is going on at the same time. Sometimes I take out my phone and it's like people are texting me, there's air raids in Kiev, there's air raids in Odessa, there's something happening in Amsterdam, there's somebody texting me. So this is kind of, for me personally, was something, this format of this kind of all the tubes talking at the same time,

what sometimes happens around me. There's kind of like a chatter that you hear, like you hear yours, but you kind of hear a mumbling of being in the midst of lots of conversations. So, for example, we have now 13 pipe exits with six channels, so they all talk at the same time, and you can't really understand what's going on until you take one and suddenly something becomes clearer. Even if it's not always hyper clear, something's starting to become there. so I think it was kind of more of a way of how to reposition it or how to change it from very cognitive understanding of news or what's happening in this kind of screen format into a spatialized way of you exploring it and maybe in the context of Venice there is a lot of experience with a start and an end it's a very different work it's kind of meant to feel uncomfortable but you also can choose how long you spend there how you can come there like a month later and listen to something else, if it would be a format where we're in a festival. And yes, with the hit,

I think because the installation is here for an hour a week, so it's also the installation is getting tired, so I need to turn it off and on every once in a while. It's like headsets, it gets overworked. Same with the tubes, they're also like, oh my God. But it really depends where the work is situated and how it feels. But yeah, I think it's very much related to this kind of oversaturation and how everything is going on and then my desire to connect something more poetic way of dealing with this into a physical form which you can explore individually and also for example it was always like this but now we it's around six people per slot with less show up a bit more show up defense but you all hear different things at the same time so you would never have the same experience somebody else at the same time so it's also about if you're experience it together and you step outside you can also exchange what you've heard what you didn't and I experienced somebody during the drinks at the immersive section I was asking two people who experienced the work together what did they point their attention to and then for somebody one story

of me talking to my dad was very impactful and somebody else was hearing part of the diary and then they were hearing some field recording and for them it was something they interpreted something else so even though they were at the same time they got some very different experience out of same thing. So it's also kind of a part of this installation format which allows it when it's never as possible with like a linear sound recording. Have you considered having other formats in terms of like, because I've experienced the installation, I feel like I got a sense of it and a fragmented sense, but also like there's so much of it that I didn't get a chance to experience. And, you know, if you put it into a more curated or linear if you thought about that as another way of making that content available or if you just more interested in the installation experience of it I actually for a while I thinking about how and what would make sense to release it in example, in a track form, or in one long podcast or reading, or if you do a track list with these collections, which are more collaged, but then per track each.

So I was thinking about it, so I was looking for, I think I'm still looking for a right platform or partner or kind of right focus of how to do it. And now I was talking to a few places which wanted, are asking me about an online works or something which can be experienced online. And this is what came to mind. It was like, oh, maybe it's finally a moment how to then to think how to release all this content outside of installation format and have it next to the work so you can experience it differently as well. And of course, the installation format is very much in here and now, and then you will never be able to experience it in your home. it also changes the way how you understand information and also if you encounter it now and in a year the content will also change or develop but I'm definitely thinking about what would make the most sense how to release it otherwise more of like kind of than maybe compositional way of talking about it because again I'm not an institution which works in archive I'm an artist who tries to collect this as much as possible and also tries to bring her own voice in it to communicate and kind of to resonate with others

so what would make the most sense so you're not trying to say that oh yeah this is an archive which represents something something but this is still an artistic take upon this information yeah when i talked to casper sonan he referred to william uricchio as this metaphor of linear film is like you get on a guided tour bus of a city and you go and get all the landmarks and that there's another way of exploring a city which is where you kind of wander and stumble upon things And so I feel like there's a bit of that wandering experience that you've recreated in this. And so there's certain things that I stumbled upon in terms of these patterns or themes of there's a lot of communication between people and family members and friends. And very much like this telephone game where you're getting information around maybe childhood friends or people that your mother knows from the neighborhood where son was sent off to war is now passed. and just this experience of being in conversation with the neighborhood community, friends, family,

to get these updates in terms of what's happening. So that seemed to be a core theme of the piece in terms of the transmission of information, but also these anecdotes of, I think there's one that you might have been going on a date and then preparing borscht and bringing in the date to help the preparation and then getting a phone call, but then now you're off in this other kind of whole experience. And so there's this ways that the war has permeated all the different dimensions of life and how it is interrupting in different ways. Or, yeah, just this kind of transmission information from your relationship. So, yeah, I don't know if you were to try to summarize some of those themes that you were trying to get at or things that kind of recur. I don't know if you have found a way of kind of summarizing or describing some of the core essence of the patterns that you see amongst all the different dispatches that you're including. I think there's communication what you rightly noticed that there's a lot of phone calls and communication I think it's, first of all because I moved abroad when I was very young

so I always say that my family my friends and a lot of people I love and very close to me live in my phone so I'm very rarely with them in the same physical environment and it's a lot of my personal comfort comes from having access to my phone and to information and communication and it especially became true in the beginning of Invasion and when the kind of like your reality of how you know it and you know like i would never in my life imagine the experience that i would have to deal with war situation as i think a lot of people who live in western europe now or in parts of the us that it's just not daily routine to check somebody's alive or not and it what became the reality of well you are glued to your phone all the time to this communication to news to air raids to friends if everybody's okay and it was you said that you're family experiencing air raid for tornadoes, what you're checking on them and like kind of this kind of checking what is towards you or away from you. And I think just because it's very personal to me, this kind of phone communication. And it also became true very much to a lot of people in the

beginning of the war when it all started. And I think it continues to be this. So that's also very much present in the piece. And I live mostly abroad. So it's also a lot of that is kind of my relation to whatever is happening is through this communication online or phone calls so that's kind of one of the main recurring thing but also what happens with text messages phone calls is like you're somewhere we're talking we're having a podcast we're talking about immersive art and then i check my time i check my phone i turn the screen and then two messages are in two words somewhere else something else is happening there's a different reality so that's also you sometimes i think that's what you very rightly mentioned that's like i'm on a date something is happening then I get a phone call and something else starts completely because we're in a different reality when somebody else is dealing with something which is very far away but then it impacts you instantly. So that's one of the kind of very occurring things and of course there's stories of like transitioning from kind of being in the road or something is changing or something is shifting, approaching something or encountering somebody

and I think there's also kind of like a slight motif of me encountering my friends or family or people in Ukraine and something changed, something shifted, something is different. And I'm reflecting on this also, like, how I remember it or how I'm kind of used to it. And now something is very different. It's like Odessa is very different. The environment is very different. The people's reaction to things is very different. So that's also kind of this ongoing thing, which appears in the work from my very personal stories. And, of course, yeah, I think also in the water collected materials as well. Yeah, I'm curious to hear you add any other highlights from the diaries from Maripal in terms of like that story as it's unfolding. I came across it maybe once or, you know, as I was going through, but didn't get a chance to really get a sense of how that arc is unfolding. So the diary, the full diary is 34 days. I think the selection in the work is now 13 days. So it kind of runs from day one to day three,

and then it kind of skips and appears, disappears. what happens there very clearly I think I mentioned briefly before is that reality starts to collapse so if we start with her like oh my supervisor at work was weird and they sent us home and I don't understand when everybody is panicking to a full on kind of change of existence of reality and there what you hear very well and what she describes on some point in Mariupol there is no more internet or phone reception and because it's dangerous to go outside a lot and it's very unclear what happens in other part of the cities so on some point they lose any understanding if their loved ones or their neighbors from different building are alive or not and she describes it a lot and a lot and over and over again how disorientating how isolating this is so it's kind of like from kind of like a full feel like a normal life it becomes something very hard to imagine even for me it's hard to imagine how it is to be so this kind of abstraction in complete gruesomeness of what's becoming out of their daily life that's very

impactful and this is kind of how it progresses and that's how it ends and it ends very abruptly because it's a written diary so in the prologue to the diary before the start of the diary i talk about again about my eye and about how i encountered it and what impact it made on me and i give a bit of information what are we gonna hear and then this diary starts and then in the same, the last day, the last entrance of the diary. In the book itself, how they published it, it says this is where the diary ends. So we hear until that moment, we hear the voice of an actress, and then I say this is where the diary ends. And then I give a bit of a context of what happened to her after the diary, which I mentioned before that she passes away, and then how they take the diary out. So I try to frame it a little bit for the audience, to send a bit more context, but then when you encounter it story by story, you understand how it progresses into this kind of complete unimaginable horror of this kind of losing of communication which i think is also kind of a very distinct counterpart to my personal stories and like constantly being in touch and on

the phone and communicating and them losing this opportunity in the city which was occupied so this is kind of in between these two and when i was listening there's also like music and audio clips that seem to be in some ukrainian language clips as well and so just curious to hear around some of the other types of audio clips that are integrated in there. You mentioned like Instagram and other things, but just curious how you make sense of how that also fits in. So one part of it is actually missile recordings. So people, that's what happens. It's like they either share videos or sound recordings. And there's a few brilliant artworks about this. There's a wonderful artwork which was in Venice at the Biennale Arte, last edition from Polish Pavilion, but they're Ukrainian, called Repeat After Me. It's about how people sonify the sound of different missiles, and it's about how you kind of internalize this kind of different sound of different weapons. So here it's the same in a way that people share different recordings of different weapons, and it sounds very different, so you start to distinguish what is what.

So there are a lot of reactions on, like, something is going on. Then there's also some daily life recordings, which was either mine or sound artists which live in Ukraine. So, for example, wonderful Ivan Skorina, who shared a lot of their recordings with me from their first two years, which they were like just daily life in Ukraine. So there is church bells, there's people on the streets talking. Then there is recording of Malanka, which is Ukrainian traditional New Year's carnival, which predominantly happens in the villages in the West and also in part of the Southern Ukraine. but with the regain or kind of re-understanding of Ukrainian culture more and more young people and like young organizations do it also in big cities so there's also one in Kiev so that's the thing which you hear with like a lot of bells then there's also a lot of sounds which provides travel so there is different modes of transportation and then there's one particular one which is if you ever traveled in trains in Ukraine you will know the sound because tea in Ukrainian trains are served in a glass cup,

which is in the metal cup holder. And there's a space between the glass and the metal, so when the train moves, the cup makes a very peculiar sound, which is also one of the recordings in the work. But it's a very kind of sound which you know if you ever traveled in that train. Like, you will know it. So it's kind of without a specific context. So if you know it, you know it. If not, you'll either hear this or you'll never know it, but it's something. so that's kind of all these different moments like different very small details of what's happening in this daily life of this routine situation Yeah, I wasn't able to place or understand the full context of a lot of those but just curious if all the different times you've exhibited this piece if you've had Ukrainians that see it and some of their actions have been I had a very interesting one because I was always very worried because I don't think this work is as it is now is a version which I can show in Ukraine it doesn't make sense there for me as it's now is composed because it very much talks about my personal experience which was very kind of from outside and it's in English

and it has a lot of things which people experience daily so I don't find value in it to show it again to them so if I would ever show it in Ukraine I would change the narrative or like do a different logic of storytelling or like placing things I had very good reactions I had people who were like oh I'm not target audience but it's great that you're doing it I had people who found this particular very small sound very impactful or like it's very reminding them of being back home and it was very a lot of value i had a lot of people who resonated ukrainian not ukrainian with my personal stories for example talking to my family or talking to my dad there's one particular story when i call my dad on the first day of invasion and he assures me that we will be fine it's all going to be fine they're not going to boom civilians it's not going to happen and i reflect on that he's lying and he knows he's lying i know he's lying we all know he's lying but it's the most fatherly thing he can think of right now not to admit to me that something can go wrong and a lot of people resonate with this story a lot because their relationship to their parents is also very much in this kind of

i don't know play of like okay i trust you you're on my bed now it's okay Yeah, wow. Yeah, are there any other clips that really hit you when you hear them or ones that when you put them in or stories? I'm just curious as you personally go through it, you know, something that really kind of resonates with you. There is one, I think it's from this summer, which I came to Ukraine for the first time. So, again, my personal story, because it's kind of the most of the thrill for me. It was a story where I was going to see my friends in Odessa, and it was very, very hot. And it was just after Russia bumped the biggest dam in Ukraine, and it flooded a big ecosystem park. And also, all the flood went into the water in Odessa, in the Black Sea. So, it polluted the water. So, for a while, there was a big ecological ecocide problematics of them cleaning the water.

You couldn't swim. You couldn't fish. It was quite disastrous. and it was a very hot summer and this kind of inability in the beach city to go to the sea this kind of strange situation and me arriving to the city just after the attack and seeing the husband of my friend And for me I feel very emotional because of how I felt in the moment So when I kind of re-listen to it, it resonates a lot. And I think now the diaries as well. Like, I don't know. We had to, we recorded it in Kiev recently, and we were re-listening to it with a sound engineer, which we were recording it constantly to edit it. And it's just, the more you listen to it, the more it stays in your mind and then you realize that it's kind of unbelievable what happens to all of us. And the more it exists, the more I'm kind of emotional and tired, I guess. So I think it's very important to keep this conversation. All these accounts are extremely important and it's great. And I think more and more people need to encounter this and know about this and also to understand conflicts in a different way.

way. So I think I still hope that this work can not only be about Ukraine, but also can help to resonate with different conflict situations. So I think that's awesome. But I also get extremely emotional and very exhausted in exhibitions when I keep having to relive it or go into the work. And then somehow even subconsciously, I'm like, I'm done. Well, it seems like that there's at least part of this artistic process where you're able to, you know, I've known that when I've created personalized work that there can be a part of doing a lot of the technical details and then at some point you can just sort of surrender yourself and actually kind of receive it all and i'm not sure if that was similar to you kind of doing all the logistics and then being able to just like receive the transmission for the first time and what was that like for you to be able to actually experience your piece for the first time i think it's i used to when i was studying and for a while i would avoid very personal things and works because i didn't know how to place it i was not sure about it and then I started kind of integrating and started doing it more and more

and with the presence of invasion I think it became more and more valuable and kind of more necessary so I wrote everything we recorded it I had it and I was already kind of like how I'm going to present it to public it feels a bit uncomfortable I feel like I'm going to be judged or not I'm not sure and then we turned it on and I listened to it I was like I cannot show it to people. I cannot do this. I don't know what's happening anymore. And I had to leave and then my sound engineer and the curator of the space and the director of the museum in The Hague had to go downstairs. It was in the basement to work and listen to it. No, like, okay, come back in 20 minutes. We will tell you what's happening. And I come back in 20 minutes and the curator sits on the floor and like closing his face. The director of the museum is standing in the corner and they're like, okay, this is intense. This is beautiful, but this is really intense. So I think it can be perceived like this, but it also can be something that's really different for different people. But when I saw them in this state

and they kind of really got it or really like got to that space, I was like, okay, we show it, it's fine. It will live by its own life. And I also have to say that recording this or kind of externalizing all of what happened to me, but also collecting this really helped me to have it somewhere else and having kind of understanding it on a different scale and kind of, okay, this exists. This is what it is. I could share it. I did the best I could with all whatever happened or happening. So it exists somewhere else. And it's also very helpful in that sense of, like, personally to kind of, I don't know, we understand things. So it's very important. Yeah, there was a piece at Tribeca Immersive in 2017. I think it was called Testimony VR. And it was around sexual assault and rape. And there was women giving testimony. And they had a mechanic where if anything got too intense, you would just look away and it would stop. I feel like there's something similar in your piece in a way that if it gets too intense, you can always just drop the tube from your ear and move on or walk away in a way that actually gives agency for the people listening

to have more control over what's coming in without feeling like they're being bombarded in a way that is too much. So it's a similar mechanic in a way that is putting the agency in the listener's hands to be able to control what information they're taking in. Exactly. I think it's also important that when you walk in, that you hear this general landscape of there's a lot of happening. It's like a constant noise of something's going on. And as what I mentioned before, we take a tube and something starts to come to light, like something is unfolding. And then you can encounter it from the beginning, from the middle, from the end, and then it's all kind of mixed and matched. which I think it allows a lot of agency of like, okay, if this is not for me, maybe something else is for me. If I don't hear this well, maybe something else can grab my attention. And I also really think it's with which intention do you come in? I also had a lot of people come in, like listen very quickly, understand the mechanics, got a few words, I'm like, okay, fine. Or I had people walking in and like, okay, I'm not ready for this right now, I'll come back later.

So it really depends on which kind of mindset you come in. But something always stays, even if somebody doesn't get deep into the installation, this first encounter of like having this of overall sounds and the kind of the presence of the tubes already leave an impression so even if something didn't work for them at least the overall scape of the project left something so that was also an interesting conversation i had with somebody today yeah for sure yeah i really uh can understand all those different like ways of it's an immersion festival what's the mechanics of how it works you told me the six hours i was I know I'm not going to be able to get that. I just try to at least go three times to get a little sampling in different parts. And for me, every time the sirens came on was really powerful because it's like a cacophony of disparate voices. And then you have this unified experience that you're in a sound bath of all of the tubes kind of resonating at the same time in a way that creates a timing that gives people permission to say, okay, now this might be a good time to stop or, you know, a good time to start.

or go for another round, but kind of marking time in a way that allows people to stay in there. And you said that you encourage people when they see it that they can stay as long as they want to take it in. So, yeah, really appreciate the setup for people to, you know, I do a Voices of VR podcast. I have these vast archives, but to have ways of creating these immersive experiences, to have a little bit of a taste of an archive and to dip in and create this serendipitous wandering for people. to get access to things. And so, yeah, I'm just curious to hear where you're going to take this next if you want to continue to develop this or where you want to go here in the future. I think I have, now I have like, now I work a lot with immersive experiences and like different ways and forms. And I try to work from a point of like, I have an idea of what I want to achieve or what I want to explore. And then I try to find the format which fits it the most. So I very rarely come with like, okay, now we're writing VRs. We're going to do VR every time. No, I come up with like, okay, I want to explore this and this and this, and what would work for this.

So for this project, it was the tubes, and it was the whole story, which we talked about already. And I think in the same kind of, it's in the same line of work, which I'm working on now is actually AI and censorship. It's called Sensitive Guidelines, the work in development, and it's going to be, I think, interactive video in a way that explores this kind of invisibility of content or social media in raising content from board territories. And it's not only in Ukraine, but it will start with Ukraine and then explore further. And the visuals of it will come from an image from Kiev when there was an attack in the very city center. The blast from the explosion damaged the LED screens with advertisements. So it didn't destroy it, but it blew out the pieces of the LED screens. So it's kind of a very scrambled LED screen, which still produces information, but it's totally out of place because they're all kind of hanging on their wires. So it's quite an interesting way of scrambling information.

So I'm trying to build an interactive narrative to work with these kind of broken screens. That's one part of research, which continues this working with current news, recording with archives and materials like this. And the other part, which relates to my work, which released in 2025 at Rotterdam Film Festival and was in West London and with the maze in Berlin, this game festival. It's called Otherworlds and it explores Ukrainian pagan rituals and Ukrainian traditions and it's a multiplayer VR experience and an installation which is very abstract and works with a lot of Ukrainian context but in a very abstract and symbolic way and now we're doing the second part of that which is going to be Malanka which is actually the sounds of which you can hear in Spomany, that's the singing but this is going to be focused on this culmination a winter carnival procession. So it will incorporate a lot of traditional singing, traditional voices, costumes and a way to understand this kind of coming together as a ritual in the

XR environment. So, so far we're in development and we got budget from Ukraine to go film in Ukraine in January and I'm going to bring it to the Netherlands and work with developers to do an interactive installation and the VR version. So it's going to be two in one, pieces parallel to each other. So that's the plan. Nice. That sounds really amazing. Awesome. And finally, what do you think the ultimate potential for immersive storytelling might be and what it might be able to enable? I really believe that immersive storytelling is the future of how to understand each other and understand things which you would not otherwise feel and experience. And I think we talked about it today that you can be really overwhelmed by news in general or by a constant stream of information. But when you bring an actual personal storytelling and you extend it through somebody or through something, which is very sometimes minimal, but very personal, it really changes the way you do it, the way something is perceived.

And I also believe that embodiment and kind of understanding something, not only cognitively, but through your senses, through your body, creates a different experience, different reality, and makes it much more real and much more close. So I believe that development of a variety of immersive tools can be very powerful and impactful to telling a lot of stories and to create a lot of experiences. And I also don't see immersive storytelling being limited to headsets. I present the work in the biggest immersive space, which is VR-focused with a very minimal technology, and it's very interesting to see how it's being perceived. So I believe in this kind of mix-and-match collage of technological development to tell a different variety of stories or create experiences. Awesome, is there anything else that's left and said that you'd like to say to the broader immersive community? I'm just very happy actually to be in this context with such a work and that it's possible to kind of open up borders between visual arts, fine arts, media arts community, VR and immersive storytelling and it can exist together and tell bigger and broader stories

and not only focus on narratives which can fit in specific headset or specific technology but also I sometimes encounter in immersive spaces and in immersive festivals there's a lot of experiences from specific countries which have funding structured for immersive pieces. So it's very wonderful to have an opportunity to present stories which would not otherwise be supported and also see more and more there's a wonderful Palestinian experience, there's wonderful people from different communities and cultures bringing ways of understanding and bringing different immersivity into this context And I think it's very important to have such a variety of important voices to hear. Awesome. Well, Sophia, thanks so much for joining me here on the podcast to be able to break down Spomany. How did I say it again? Spomany. Spomany. Spomany. Thanks so much for talking about Spomany. And, yeah, I think having this vast archive and, yeah, these testimonies are so important and vital. And, you know, I really resonated with those first-person-I statements of accounting,

of getting a sense of the impact of these wars and occupations and war crimes that are happening with these imperial powers. And so it just grounds it in a way that, you know, I've seen documentaries about it, but having kind of an immersive experience of an archive of material, hearing those direct testimonies is really quite powerful. and just to hear the destabilizing aspects of how it creates this type of hypervigilance of connectivity and relationality and uncertainty. And, yeah, I just really enjoyed the power of the piece. And thanks so much for joining me today on the podcast to help break it all down. So thanks so much. Thank you so much for having me. Thanks so much for listening to the Voices of VR podcast. And I just want to say that I'm really trying to live into the transformation economy, meaning I want to give away all this information for free. make it publicly accessible for not only you, but the entire community. And if you find value in that, then please do consider supporting me on Patreon. I'm on this journey of trying to reach my 1,000 true fans,

and if I have just $5 a month from that 1,000, I'll be in a much more solid and stable financial position. So I really need your help to be able to get to that point. So if you enjoy what I'm doing here at the Voices of VR podcast, then please do consider supporting me at patreon.com slash Voices of VR. Thanks for listening. Thank you.