MYKOLAIV IN AUTUMN 2024

Yevgenia BelorusetsKyiv

Journalist and photographer Yevgenia Belorusets returns to Mykolaiv, a southern Ukrainian city repeatedly targeted by Russian artillery since the outbreak of war in 2022. She finds not only the buildings in ruins, but the city’s very infrastructure: as a result of Russian attacks, the city’s water system has been completely dismantled, and any attempts to repair it are met with fierce skirmishes. The city she once knew as a blissful seaside resort now appears as the site of a medieval plague, its inhabitants stuck indoors for days on end with no water or electricity. Old women, taxi drivers and officials at Mykolaiv’s water supply company tell stories of their day-to-day lives, sketching a panorama of a city ground down by war, and governed by fear.

The humanism of the past five hundred years is dead. Believing man was exceptional, it opened the abyss of extinction. A new approach requires the effort of all those who tear down convention in order to preserve what is meaningful—that is not just environments, but irrationality, autonomy, and joy. isolarii take their name from the extinct genre of Venetian Renaissance 'island books.' Month to month, they map the extremes of human knowledge and creative endeavour, assembling the perennial legends and emerging icons—scientists and novelists, philosophers and activists, architects and technologists, from the counterculture to the avant-garde—pioneering new ways of understanding ourselves and the Earth.