How to describe destruction? Through smells and sounds.
Old wood and dry lacquer - that is the smell of the House of Scientists after the explosion. The smell of antiques turned into rubbish in a single second. The smell of intellectual refinement mixed with concrete. On Deribasivska it smells of coffee and gunpowder at once. It is simply a morning in a city that has decided to continue.
And the sound. Not music - the dry rustle of the plastic sheeting they pull over blown-out windows. The rhythmic tapping of hammers nailing plywood where there used to be a view of the sea. This sound is not about despair. It is the metronome of a new norm. Every strike says: we are staying inside.
Behind the cathedral wall it smells of damp plaster and burnt wax. In hotel lobbies it smells of expensive perfume and fresh paper. There they compile reports, drink coffee, assess the damage. The first wish is to erase. To putty over. To restore it as it was. What they call reconstruction, we call an act of lobotomy. Any attempt to give cities back a sterile appearance destroys the very thing that has appeared in them: the memory of matter that met chaos and held out.
For institutions, a crack in a facade is a loss of value. For us, a crack in a wall is a line of force. When I look at these scars, I see a resistance that cannot be simulated in any design bureau. They are trying to make a museum out of our ruins. To confine pain to specific points so that the rest of the space stays "normal". So that you can arrive, photograph the tragedy, and go back to a silence where nothing cuts the eye.
But we do not want to live in a museum.
It is happening everywhere - from Kharkiv to Kherson, from Mariupol to hundreds of villages that are no longer on the map. I see a child drawing with chalk on the plywood covering a shop window. I see a woman raking broken glass into a neat pile by a tree, not trying to hide it. People are returning to half-ruined houses. Their presence no longer depends on the walls being whole.
I have seen people drinking coffee by shattered shop windows. This is a new aesthetic asserting itself. An aesthetic where broken glass is not rubbish but the only honest witness. It does not shine. It cuts anyone who tries to look the other way.
A concrete block from a checkpoint has become part of the urban landscape. A rocket crater, part of a courtyard. We do not clear this away. We build around it. We need an architecture with memory - not one that suffers from amnesia, but one that wears its wounds as structure.
"The Southern Palmyra". "Little Paris". We were always made understandable through other people's names. Written into a familiar catalogue. Now we do not fit.
Restoration is an escape. An attempt to pretend the burn never happened. To paint over our scars means to paint over our subjecthood. To return us to the status of an object - to a convenient horizontal line that does not irritate the eye.
We choose the vertical of the ruin, which refuses to fall.
We do not want to go back to the silence that was there before 2022. That silence was an illusion we kept up ourselves - we pretended that we too were allowed to choose anaesthesia. That this unbearable tension was a pathology and not a sign that you are alive.
Beneath that horizontal line a vertical was living all along. Now it is visible.