The Brush Shop on the Edge of War Is Open

I watched all the films, read all the books people recommended, but I still knew nothing. My grandfather tried to tell me about Italy, fascism, and the courage nestled in the Emilia mountains by those who refused to surrender, but his words felt like far-off stories, fairy tales beginning with “once upon a time,” the kind told to lucky children before they drift off to sleep. This time, though, the war was close, remains close, and I went to visit it. 

What does it mean to visit a country at war when your country has the privilege of being at peace? I am still not sure, but it certainly changes your perspective. First banal truth: war is a lens that makes you see things differently. I wish I could be original, but sometimes the truth is banal. Below, I’ve written a travel diary of the deeply banal yet profoundly eye-opening lessons war taught me in one week.

Kyiv, Day 1 – You Never Forget Your First Drone Alarm

Or rather, Night 1. It’s 11:30 p.m., and I am beyond exhausted. To get to Kyiv from Milan, I caught a train at 6 a.m., then a plane to Warsaw, Poland. After a six-hour layover, I boarded a bus for what seemed like the final leg of the journey. Instead, it marked the beginning of an epic. Sixteen hours by bus, four at the border, and one sandwich with lisiecka later, I finally arrived in Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine—a country at war with Russia since 2014 and defending itself against a full-scale invasion since February 2022.

At the bus stop, a young blonde Ukrainian man, Andrys Lutsiv, awaited me, dressed in camouflage. The second banal truth: the truth is banal. Andrys’s arms are covered in tattoos, and I instantly recognise the Latin phrase Veni Vidi Vici. Smiling, he extends a beautiful bouquet of pink flowers from his tattooed arm. “Welcome to Ukraine,” he says. It’s late. I take the most satisfying shower of my life and dive under the covers. People have always told me I’m a heavy sleeper—“Not even bombs would wake you,” they used to say. It turns out bombs can.

In the middle of the night, my phone blares at a volume I didn’t even know it could reach. “Alert! Alert!” repeats the government app, and moments later, the hotel alarm joins in: “Danger: drone attack. Proceed immediately to the shelter.”

I wake with a start, remember where I am, and grasp what’s happening., I throw on a sweater with the agility of a gazelle, lace up my shoes, and sprint down eight flights of stairs to the underground shelter. I’m not sure where I learned to react like this in dangerous situations. Before coming here, I thought I was the kind of person who would freeze and turn into an ice cube. Evidently not. Well, better this way, I think.

The shelter is nearly empty, a fact I’ll understand only days later. The hours spent in the bunker during a drone attack are dull—nothing like the movies with all their action, adrenaline, and elaborate planning scenes. 

There is no cell signal in the bunker, so you can’t even check the news in real time and pretend it’s about you. I forgot my book in my gazelle-like dash for safety, so I wrap myself in a synthetic blanket kindly provided by the hotel, sip some tea, and doze off in a chair. After a few hours, the alarm is lifted, and we’re allowed to return to our rooms. The bed feels like heaven.

Kyiv, Day 2 – When Cities Go to Sleep

Late in the afternoon, I visited the studio of Ukrainian artist Nikita Kadan. I was joined by my fellow travellers, all here to “visit the war:” two artists (Stefan Klein and Nicola Zucchi), a journalist specializing in high-risk zones (Marie-Line Deleye), a curator/artist studying dance as a means of exorcising trauma in conflict zones (Bogomir Doringer), and a cultural operator and educator from Magnum Photo Agency (Pierre Mohamed-Petit). Also present are other Ukrainian artists: painter Yuriy Bolsa, curator Alona Karavai, and artists Sana Shahmuradova Tanska and Olga Stein. We spent the evening on the rooftop terrace of Nikita’s studio, housed in an elegant building in Kyiv. If artists have large studios in bourgeois buildings in the capital, it means the real estate market has truly collapsed. 

We eat pizza straight from the box and drink champagne. We talk about everything and nothing. The full moon rises in front of us, brighter than I’ve ever seen it. While searching for cigarettes, I freeze the moment: artists, a full moon, and conversations about resistance. A Tuesday night, and a dose of truth straight to the veins.

In Ukraine, the night has been stolen for the past three years, ever since martial law imposed a mandatory curfew. By 11 p.m., it’s time to head back to the hotel. I walk home, guided by Google Maps, which leads me past a park. It’s night, and dark—darker than I remembered nights could be.

I look around, and there isn’t a single street lamp on, not even a neon sign, for miles. Or so it seems—I’m nearsighted, so I estimate distances loosely. It feels oppressively dark.

Fear sets in, and I glance around nervously. If you’re a woman raised in Italy, you know to fear parks at night. Someone might attack you, no one would hear, and you’d have to live with the trauma—and battle a justice system that wouldn’t believe you. Then I remember something one of my companions mentioned: the darkness is a military precaution. Even cities need to sleep, not just their inhabitants, because if the lights are on and the streetlamps glow, it makes it easier for the Russians to target them. So, the city cloaks itself in darkness to hide, and everyone adheres to the curfew. I reconsider my fear of the man in the dark1 in the park. If a drone attacks, both he and I would die. If I’m scared, he’s scared too. And so, the drone becomes scarier than the park.

Kharkiv, Day 3 – The Brush Shop with the Open Door

My mind plays a strange game when I think of Kharkiv. It’s as if the little hamster running my mental wheel starts spinning furiously, and my memory shifts into x4, x6, x8 mode—like hitting fast-forward on a movie remote. Images of bombed-out houses, mutilated soldiers, and stolen futures flash by, followed by glimpses of the city’s lush park, a Viktor proposing to a Marija at the station with a bouquet of red roses, and the local bakery. That day feels fragmented, like shards of broken glass—impossible to piece together into what it was before it hit the ground. Maybe it takes time to remember better. Or maybe time dulls the memory, and at some point, you stop caring about the sharp fragments cutting into your thoughts. But when I think of Nataliia, everything slows down.

Nataliia Ivanova is the curator of the Yermilov Center, which opened as a museum in 2012 but was once a strip club. From the start, it’s been housed in a bomb shelter—a cool choice for a contemporary art space back then, but a life-saving necessity now. Nataliia recently curated the exhibition Sense of Safety2, and during Thomas Hirschhorn’s installation, my companions and I—here to “visit the war”—joined a roundtable discussion. We debated whether art can have a healing power. Sitting in an artwork- chair at the Yermilov Center, I asked myself what I really knew about art’s power to heal. Before coming here, when I spoke of museums as “safe spaces,” I was thinking about theoretical concepts: critical thinking and free debate. Not literal safety, as in a place where your head won’t explode.

In Kharkiv, I learned that the closer you are to war, the more life asserts itself, vividly and fiercely. The world, and the web, are full of images of pain and death—most people barely care. So, let me tell you about the joy and happiness I found in Kharkiv.

At a corner near one of many monuments wrapped up for protection—not by Christo and Jeanne-Claude, but by the state, because public art signatures mean nothing to bombs —a rock ‘n’ roll duo played by the roadside. Nearby, I found a bakery selling what they called “the world’s best cinnamon rolls.” Sitting outside the bakery with my companions, all of us “visiting the war”, we had grown used to silencing our phones. The alarms never stop, constantly interrupting conversations. So, we muted our devices and savoured each moment instead. When life forces you to choose, I’d rather die with a cinnamon roll in my mouth and sunlight on my skin than cower underground like a cockroach. Dinner came, time to try Kharkiv’s famous borscht. On the way to the restaurant, we passed through a bombed-out street, its buildings bearing raw, bleeding scars. But tragedy is for journalists, and I’m a curator, so I’ll tell you about the brush shop.

Amid the urban devastation, the wail of alarms, and the wounds of the city’s buildings, a small family- run shop selling paints and brushes stood open. It didn’t sell water, food, or other necessities—just tools for making art. It might seem absurd, but when you’ve lost everything, art becomes essential again. Drawing is a way to cope, to release what would otherwise consume you from within. Some might argue it’s a form of self-trauma, and perhaps they’re right. But sometimes you have no choice— you need to vomit out how you feel somewhere. The shop’s door was wide open, almost as if to shout: bombs are terrifying, but we’re not leaving. Here, we resist. If anyone needs to paint today, the brush shop on the edge of war is open. 

Kyiv, Day 4 – Speak as You Eat

Starting today, I’m changing the language I use. I’m no longer “dead tired,” nor will I “bombard” you with emails. There are places in the world where these words aren’t metaphors, so it’s worth making an effort to find new ways of conveying ideas—ones that don’t mirror this misery.

Kyiv, Day 5 – Shameful Thoughts

I enjoyed being in a war zone. I know it sounds crazy—and maybe I am a little—but I’ve decided to be honest; otherwise, why waste my time writing, and yours reading? I think I liked it because it made me feel the “vertigo of history.” In a war zone, you’re no longer just in some random place, doing random things, with random people nearby. Or maybe you are, but it feels different. You feel like you matter. Like you’re at the center of events, in the nucleus of things, part of something bigger. Even the smallest action you take suddenly seems like it could shape the course of history, the future of generations to come: the vertigo of history. An Ukrainian artist shared a shameful thought with me during a drone alert and over a bottle of red wine in a Kyiv courtyard. He said life in Ukraine had always been dull—banal and flat—but now, in some twisted way, he feels happy. Even with the death, there’s a sense of making history.

The truth of reality goes straight into your veins.

It’s cruel, it devours your soul, but it also loves you fiercely. I don’t know how, but the closer you are to pain, the more love resonates. Everything is so fragile, so fleeting, that you experience each moment with your heart and soul wide open to everything and everyone. Souls wide open—like the door of the paintbrush shop in Kharkiv. So what if I miss the metro or reply to your email tomorrow?
Right now, I’m toasting at 10 a.m. during the first studio visit of the day because today, I’m alive, you’re alive, and the studio is still standing with all the art it shelters.
War is a drug—it enters your veins, and once it starts coursing through your body, adrenaline pulsing with your blood, your thoughts align on levels of love and pain so intense that, when you return, everything feels slow, stupid, and pointless. At least, that’s how it feels to someone who went to visit the war. I’m sure it’s very different for those who live it.

Day 6 – Studio Visits in Wartime

I came to Ukraine to learn about the local art scene, to visit studios, meet artists and colleagues, and imagine international cultural projects. Networking, just in a riskier way. No one told me that the Sofia who left a week ago wouldn’t exist anymore. Seeing war for the first time feels like losing your virginity— you’re forced to confront who you are and what space you occupy in the world. Once you witness war, you grow up, whether you’re eight years old kicking a ball around or not. I was lucky enough to spend years kicking a ball without worrying about anything else. Now it’s my turn to protect someone else’s game, so I am networking, curating, and building international projects with Ukrainian artists. I don’t know if Ukrainian artists were already this brilliant before the war. Maybe they were, but I hadn’t been here before. What I do know is that—unfortunately for them—the war, amidst its explosions, has made them masters. There’s no room anymore for superficial research, for floating between themes,or merely brushing against materials. 

Outside the studio window, there’s a war. People are dying, children are saying goodbye to their fathers at bus stations as they head to the front lines. Like some eerie enchantment, all this energy flows back in through the studio window, taking hold of the artist’s hand to produce extraordinary work. I use the term “taking hold” because war isn’t a theme that artists tackle. It is, in every sense, a co-author of the work. During studio visits, when artists show you their creations, you inevitably find yourself in dialogue with the war as well—it has its own stories
to tell. This co-authorship between artist and war results in a cruel hymn to life within their creations. It sounds paradoxical, but it’s true.

Here are the recurring tensions I’ve noticed among Ukrainian artists living through the war:

1. They are obsessed with memory. There is a compulsive tendency to remember dates and precise details. Forgetting is considered a sin because when you are dead, the world forgets about you.
2. There is a presence of dreams and the imagination is imminent. It doesn’t matter if they paint in the Middle Ages, the 20th century, or the mid-2000s—if reality is unbearable, they invent new realities.
3. Childhood. If war is the total failure of adults, artists return to childhood, to that purity and innocence that belongs by nature to children.
   Death and life are always chasing each other.
4. They draw a lot. Perhaps because a piece of paper and some crayons are easy to carry, even if you need to run fast.
5. Many of them are obsessed with the underground and the earth. I, who only visited the war, was obsessed with the sky, which for me was sunset and dawn with friends, while here I was afraid of the sky, because that’s where the missiles come from.
6. Many work with sound. Because war, in addition to being seen, also enters your ears.
7. They generally know how to build a drone. If you don’t know how, they’ll teach you, even at a techno party on Friday night, because if you know how to make drones, maybe someone else will go to the front line.

Kyiv, Day 7 – The fears of men

On the bus back, we’re all women. Some are older, some younger, many mothers, and lots of children. The only buses men can board are those heading to the front lines. Yes, because in Ukraine, there is martial law, and no man can leave the country; everyone (at least up to the age of 65) can be mobilized. Being mobilized, they explain, means receiving a letter at home, and within three months, if you’re lucky, or usually in one, they teach you how to fight. Now, ten years into the war and two years since the large- scale invasion, men are needed more and more— partly because the military is tired, partly because others are tired or dead. So, every now and then, the police decide to mobilize people on the streets. You might be walking through the capital, and the police stop you, send you off to fight—maybe you just wanted to have a coffee or read the newspaper in the open air because it’s Sunday, but now you have to go to war.

Here, the men all seem large, strong, and muscular, but I don’t believe they aren’t afraid. Maybe if you’re big, tough, and muscular, you learn to hide it well, and society’s pressures force you to lock it in a drawer and throw away the key. Some emotions you simply cannot afford to feel, because you have to save the family, the mother, and the country. And if you’re scared, then you remember that cowards are disliked by everyone, and there’s not even a monument to the cowards, so you swallow your fear, get a  tattoo on your arm, and hang the flag of the nation. Maybe I’m wrong, after all, I came to visit a country at war, and I came as a woman.