internodes / міжвузля
internodes / міжвузля is a web-based platform that brings together Ukrainian multidisciplinary artists, filmmakers, writers, and curators to reflect on how kinship is being defined and redefined in the face of war, displacement, and ecocide. The project engages with questions such as: What does noticing and nurturing collective dreams of living and letting live look like? What are the affective powers of making kin beyond human entities and socio-political boundaries in envisioning shared futures?
Internodes are spaces between. The word’s translation in Ukrainian, міжвузля, contains вузoл, or knot. Highlighting intersections, the project evokes new plant growth, as well as networks that bind us together. It decenters the notion of an isolated individual by emphasizing connections between points. As such, internodes / міжвузля cultivates a context for dialogue, offering a chance to listen, write, grieve, gather, and reflect with one another as a means of forging more expansive and generative understandings of kinship that ground us in principles of accountability, care, and solidarity.
Artist’s statement
By acknowledging shared precariousness, how do we take on the agency of kin-making as a way of envisioning shared futures? Following Adolfo Albán Achinte, how is “re-existence as resistance” being enacted? These have been guiding questions for my work on internodes / міжвузля, an initiative that first and foremost seeks to offer an expansive platform for collective reflection, listening, and re-envisioning kinship in a contemporary Ukrainian context. Let us gather and grow in solidarity.
Bio
Born in 1998 in the USA, Maya Hayda is a curator and art historian of Ukrainian descent. She has worked with Artists Space, Canal Projects, Frappant, and PS122, and has written for The Wattis Institute, LA Review of Books, FLAT Journal, Public Parking, and The Drawing Center. She is part of the curatorial group and research lab Collective Rewilding, holds a degree in Art History and English from Wesleyan University, and is pursuing a PhD in Art History at Princeton University.
