BOOK TALK: Terra Invicta: Ukrainian Wartime Reimaginings for a Habitable Earth, edited by Adrian Ivakhiv. Ukrainian artists and humanists respond to the identity-defining war
Organized by RUTA Environmental Initiative & Tallinn University
Presenters: Adrian Ivakhiv, Kateryna Botanova, Kateryna Filyuk, Lesia Kulchynska, Taras Polataiko, Maria Sonevytsky, Oleksiy Vasyliuk, Olya Zikrata. Moderator: Epp Annus
The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 produced not only military and humanitarian responses but also scholarly and artistic ones from Ukrainians looking to the future of their country.
Terra Invicta is a series of critical and creative articulations of pasts, presents, and possible futures involving humans and the more-than-human world. The authors suggest that Ukraine is caught in an environmental war, waged by a fossil-fuel superpower against people who are prepared to lay down their lives to protect their land. This volume explores the relationship between Ukrainians – a multiethnic and multireligious people with a complicated history – and the Ukrainian land, the zemlia to which they belong. Themes include decoloniality, ecocultural identity, the politics of reconstruction, and artistic responsibility amid a war for national survival. Contributors emphasize the value of reviving multispecies relations with the land, positively transforming multicultural relations with history, and reinvigorating grassroots engagements with the state and society.
Terra Invicta grapples with the role of artistic expression in the face of war and collective loss and what it means to commit to a place, a land, a territory, in a world set in constant motion.
About the speakers:
Adrian Ivakhiv holds the J.S. Woodsworth Chair in the Humanities at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada. Until 2024, he was a Professor of Environmental Thought and Culture at the University of Vermont, USA. His books include The New Lives of Images: Digital Ecologies and Anthropocene Imaginaries in a More-than-Human World (Stanford University Press, 2025), Shadowing the Anthropocene: Eco-Realism for Turbulent Times (Punctum, 2018), and Ecologies of the Moving Image: Cinema, Affect, Nature (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013). Born in Toronto to Ukrainian refugee parents, he was a Canada-USSR Scholar in 1989–90 in Kyïv and Lviv and has conducted research in Ukraine intermittently since then. He has published on the cultural politics of Chornobyl, Ukrainian-Polish borderland identities, Ukrainian environmental ethics, and the Ukrainian Native Faith and Neo-Pagan movements. Since 2014, he has hosted the blog UKR-TAZ: A Ukrainian Temporary Autonomous Zone (blog.uvm.edu/aivakhiv-ukrtaz).
Kateryna Botanova (born in Khmelnytskyі, Ukraine) is a cultural critic, curator, and writer based in Basel, Switzerland. She is a co-curator of the Swiss multidisciplinary biennial Culturescapes; a guest senior curator of the Research Platform of the Pinchuk Art Centre (Kyïv); guest curator at the Jam Factory Art Centre in Lviv; advisory board member of RUTA Association; and a member of PEN-Ukraine. Her essays on the impact of the war on culture and the arts have been included in books published by Routledge, Forum Transregionale Studien, and Ibidem Verlag. She is editor of Reclaiming History: Decoloniality and Art in Ukraine after 1991 (PinchukArtCentre, 2025).
Kateryna Filyuk (born in Odesa, Ukraine) is a curator and researcher who served as chief curator at the Izolyatsia Platform for Cultural Initiatives in Kyïv from 2017 to 2021. She co-founded the publishing house 89books in Palermo, and is currently a PhD student at the University of Palermo and a visiting researcher at FOTOHOF Archiv (Salzburg). In 2023–24, she was a visiting PhD student at the Central European University (Vienna) and a predoctoral fellow at the Bibliotheca Hertziana at Rome’s Max Planck Institute for Art History. She lives and works in Palermo and Kyïv.
Lesia Kulchynska is a curator and visual studies researcher who has taught communication and cultural/media studies at the National University of Kyïv-Mohyla Academy and at Kyïv Academy of Media Arts; has been a Fulbright Scholar at New York University and postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Art History, Berlin; and curated The School of the Lonesome at the Kyïv Biennial in 2015. She lives in Helsinki, Finland.
Taras Polataiko (born in Chernivtsi, Ukraine) is a painter, photographer, performer, and video and installation artist who received his BFA at the Moscow State Stroganov University of Fine and Industrial Arts, and his MFA at the University of Saskatchewan. His work has been exhibited at art exhibitions around the world, including the Sao Paulo Biennale (2002), the Palau de la Virreina and Antoni Tapies Foundation in Barcelona (2003), the Center for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle in Warsaw (2000), the Lombard-Fried and Schroeder Romero galleries in New York City, and many others.
Maria Sonevytsky (born in Yonkers, NY) is an associate professor of anthropology and music at Bard College, New York State, and the author of Wild Music: Sound and Sovereignty in Ukraine (Wesleyan University Press, 2019) and the 33 1/3 Europe book Vopli Vidopliassova’s Tantsi (2023). She produced the Chornobyl Songs Project for Smithsonian Folkways (2015). She has conducted fieldwork in northern and western Ukraine and Crimea since 2008.
Oleksii Vasyliuk (born in Vasylkiv, Kyïv Oblast) is a zoologist, ecologist, and graduate of Taras Shevchenko National University (Kyïv). In 2014, he co-founded and currently leads the Ukrainian Nature Conservation Group. He has authored over seven hundred publications and co-authored four books in environmental monitoring and conservation, has served as an adviser to government representatives, and has initiated or co-initiated the creation of more than sixty protected areas in Ukraine.
Olya Zikrata (born in Kerch, Autonomous Republic of Crimea, Ukraine) is an artist-researcher currently based in Montreal, Canada. She holds a PhD in interdisciplinary humanities from Concordia University and writes on sound and post-Soviet activisms.
The moderator Epp Annus is associate professor at Tallinn University (Estonia); she also lectures at Ohio State University (USA). Her recent books include Environment and Society in Soviet Estonia, 1960-1990: An Intimate Cultural History (Cambridge UP, available open access) and Soviet Postcolonial Studies: A View from the Western Borderlands (Routledge, 2018). She is currently working on the project tentatively titled Interimperial Invisibility and the Logic of Extractivism: From Historical Contexts to Russia’s War against Ukraine.
The event is being hosted in collaboration with RUTA Association for Central, South-Eastern, and Eastern European, Baltic, Caucasus, Central and Northern Asian Studies in Global Conversation & Tallinn University, Institute of Humanities. It is organized under the auspices of the research project PRG2592 “Memory and Environment: The Intersection of Fast and Slow Violence in Transnational European Literatures.”