“Room of Words” is an audio installation about the beauty of the Ukrainian language and its power, which becomes a pillar of support in difficult times. Like exchanging passwords at checkpoints, like in the children’s ball game of associations, two people tell each other Ukrainian words — melodic, poetic, beloved and gentle to the ear. Some of these words have been forgotten, some were repressed in soviet times, some have been displaced from usage in favour of those phonetically closer to foreign — often russian — synonyms. The installation is a play without a plot but the sequence of words is not random. The war speaks through it. The words you hear associatively recreate the whirlwind of events and states of 2022 by creating a chasm between the melodic sound of Ukrainian words and the painful reality of their meanings.

 

Why do these beautiful words have such horrible meanings now?

 

This work is a manifesto:

language is a source of my esthetic experience;

language is a tool of my defence and resistance;

language is a game, an opportunity for exchange and sharing;

language is memory by which my past exists;

language is my political statement.

 

“Language is an act of love, beauty, and revolution” and we are reclaiming each of them and each of the words.