Urgent Conversations: Athens – Antwerp

When the 2022 invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Federation started, Alevtina Kakhidze felt that fleeing might be just as dangerous as staying home. She decided to stay in Muzychi, the village on the outskirts of Kyiv in which she lives and where she organises an artist residency program in her house and where her garden functions as her laboratory and her source of inspiration.  She designed two curtains for the  ‘The Artist as a Witness’ in the Parlementarium. One of the curtains is entitled ‘presence’ and urges us to follow the example of plants who are pacifists as much as possible on our planet, the other curtain is entitled ‘future’, where ‘we rebuild our bodies to be like plants’.