Embodying Ecocide : Ukrainian Artists Making Sense of Russia's War

ABSTRACT This qualitative interpretative case study has investigated how Ukrainian artists negotiate between their vocation as artists and their civic duty as citizens during Russia’s war. The theoretical framework draws on the middle-range theory of embodied sense-making; and the concepts of cosmology episode, cultural identity and cultural diplomacy are used to interpret the collected data. Situated in the paradigm of social constructivism, the thesis applies ethnography to a case of performing artists responding to the Kakhovka disaster (June, 2023) by co-creating the opera Gaia-24. Opera del Mondo for the Viennese première. Following collection of empirical material in September 2024, open coding was applied and main themes extracted. The analysis highlights key episodes from the opera; interprets the participants’ sensemaking of the disaster; and conceptualizes their identity work as a typology of four overlapping social identities. Results show that participants interpret the Kakhovka disaster as interchangeable with other tragedies during and beyond the temporality of Russia’s war. While narrating different identity types aesthetically, they enact moral and existential challenges posed by war and ecocide as cultural diplomacy. Thus, this study fills a research gap by presenting empirical research into the reality and identity work of artists at war. It also contributes to a fuller grasp of Russia’s war and accentuates artists’ role in constructing cultural identity and enacting cultural diplomacy. The study suggests further research into the sensemaking process between independent artists and state-level sagencies during war and emergency, with the aim to expand understanding of how these individuals contribute to resistance and cultural security.