What does it actually mean to be free if freedom is neither self-sufficiency nor separation from others? If it always exists within a network of relationships — with place, memory, community, history and another human being?
Throughout the day, we explored the four SIBI paths — Solidarity, Independence, Belonging and Interdependence — through landscape and memory, philosophy, poetry, the experience of the borderland and the practice of culture.
HOW TO READ A SPACE
with Lusine Kharatyan and Armen Ohanyan
We began with Armenia and the question of how a country tells its own story through space.
From Mount Ararat and the idea of Armenia as the cradle of civilisation, through the epic narrative Sasna Tsrer and the figure of Younger Mher, to the memory of the genocide, we explored how landscape, myth, literature and historical trauma create a language of collective identity.
But political space changes, and inherited narratives change with it. How can we preserve them without turning them into closed myths? How do we read a landscape that is at once a place, a memory and a political imagination?
Following the session, a Ukrainian poet Olha Povoroznyk read her poem Sevan, written after a journey to Armenia:
Today at 6 AM, we departed from Tsaghkadzor.
Complete darkness. The moon grew paler with every hour.
The taxi parked down by the lake.
We walked out onto the hill near the monastery.
It was still dark. Concentric circles appeared on the water:
An underwater monster awakens.
[…]
I cannot believe my presence here.
I only know that the sun will emerge from behind the mountain any moment now
and we will go blind, so as never to see this ever again.
ON INTIMACY
with Viktoras Bachmetjevas
From collective narratives, we moved towards the most personal dimension of freedom: intimacy.
Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition, Viktoras Bachmetjevas explored the boundaries between the private and the public — particularly in a world where almost everything can be recorded, shared and exposed to the look of an anonymous audience.
It does matter to be together without having to show it to millions of people. Intimacy needs boundaries.
We also discussed the difference between vulnerability and intimacy. The sense of closeness in itself shall not be created by exposing one’s vulnerability in public. Intimacy emerges when our vulnerability is seen by another specific person — someone with whom we are genuinely in a relationship, someone whose eyes truly see us.
Two important tasks emerged from this conversation:
We need to rethink what home means.
We need to look again at the complexity of human relationships and at what family actually means today.
BUILDING BRIDGES
with Rosana Tuzhanska and Gloria-Anastasia Chmelova, with commentary by Krzysztof Czyżewski
What practices of reconciliation does Central Europe need today — with Ukraine not as its periphery, but as an integral part of the region?
The conversation focused on dialogue, memory, education and the responsibility of culture in a new geopolitical reality.
Krzysztof Czyżewski asked what a school in a borderland should look like and what languages it should teach. He also spoke about the particular responsibility of culture when difficult historical memories — including Polish-Ukrainian history — can so easily become tools of political manipulation.
Hardly is culture given a place at the table where questions of geopolitics are discussed. But this does not release it from responsibility.
At the same time, the hierarchy of priorities is clear today: we must help Ukraine and keep sight of what matters most.
Czyżewski also spoke about the “strength of David” and about Central Europe becoming increasingly aware that its future lies in its own hands.
Being one’s own centre of the world does not mean dominating. It means that we take responsibility for our own place. If you start with yourself, you do the difficult work where you are — and thus you build outward from there.
HOW DOES FREEDOM TAKE ROOT?
with Yevheniia Nesterovych
With Yevheniia Nesterovych, we moved from the level of grand concepts towards an experience of freedom rooted in language, place and the body.
Our starting point was the Ukrainian word воля — volia: a word that encompasses both inner will and freedom, liberation.
This was not, however, a seminar about definitions. Through shared exercises, we tried to experience and recognise freedom: to explore how independence, solidarity and interdependence exist not only as ideas, but also in everyday practices, local ways of thinking and embodied experience.
What allows freedom to take root in a particular place? Where does solidarity begin in practice? And what does freedom require of us once we realise that we are interdependent?
DILEMMA CINEMA: MY DEAR THEO (2025)
dir. Alisa Kovalenko
We ended the day with Alisa Kovalenko’s My Dear Theo — a letter from a mother and volunteer soldier to her son, shaped by her experience serving in the Ukrainian Volunteer Army between 2022 and 2024.
It is a film about war, but also about separation, motherhood, love and the tension between our most personal bonds and our responsibility towards the community.
A discussion was supposed to follow the screening.
It did not.
We remained in silence.
The following morning, we began our meeting with a minute of silence — for this experience, and for those for whom it is not a film, but reality.
Perhaps this, too, was a lesson in freedom: independence does not mean solitude, belonging does not mean losing oneself, solidarity is not an abstraction, and interdependence begins with recognising that another person’s reality concerns us too.
( written by Olha Povoroznyk )