Soлomiya Magazine: A Space for Subjectivity

How did you all meet, and how did the publication begin?

Vsevolod Kazarin: Sebastian and I met each other in April 2022 in Kyiv. Sebastian had come to Ukraine as a photographer but found himself quite lost in terms of photographic expression, especially as someone who is not a frontline photographer. In that April Russia had withdrawn from key regions including Kyiv, so it was relatively safe, but many people had left and the city was very, very empty. I also come from a photographic background, having worked in fashion photography before the full-scale invasion, and like Sebastian I was wondering what to do as a photographer in these circumstances. 

We met, talked, and decided to collaborate, and we started by taking pictures of young people in Kyiv who had stayed. We grabbed our cameras, went out onto the streets, and took portraits of the young people we saw. While we were doing that, we started to think that this might be something more than just a photography series, and eventually we saw the text Andrii Ushytskyi had published on Instagram. Andrii and I were friends before I even met Sebastian. When I showed his text on Instagram to Sebastian we both liked it so much that we decided to invite Andrii to join us, and create a magazine together. We put out the first issue in June 2022, then we met Ivanna Kozachenko in Autumn 2022, and together with her we worked on the next one. Since then we’ve published five issues of the magazine.

How has it been to do that in the context of an invasion? I'm really interested in the idea of creating a space that allows creative practice to continue, in a way that’s not necessarily as a direct response to the war. 

Sebastian Wells: That's totally the thing that we're trying to do, in terms of bringing subjectivity into the discourse. When you're in a situation of war and your country has been attacked, you very quickly start to talk as a collective. You still want to be yourself, but it's very hard to identify as just you as a person, and to find yourself within this whole mass. I think to some extent that’s what we’re trying to do, to bring some subjectivity into the discussion by talking about our own experiences, whatever we feel, whatever is around us, what we can see with our own eyes, and what every one of us is thinking about. That's always hard, I think, in any situation, but the beauty is that we try to do it anyway.

How do you start putting the magazine together?

Andrii Ushytskyi: I would say you always start by looking for money, and each time it's a different scenario. We were able to find money pretty quickly for the first issue, because that was the beginning of the full-scale invasion, so many international institutions were willing to support these kinds of projects. As you progress, though, that initial interest subsides, and you have to look for different opportunities, collaborations, and ways to sustain this job. In a way it's an act of faith to keep going, because the uncertainty is extreme.

In terms of putting each issue together, we pay a lot of attention to what is going on, what is present in the cultural discourse, what is not present, and then we start to frame the magazine during the summer. We have regular strategic sessions in which we wrap everything up, understand the direction, distribute which topics each person is going to cover, and then you just see how it progresses.  

You always have something in your head at the start. For example, for the fifth issue we were trying to envision the future, but as we actually started working we realised that this topic, ‘the future’, is so nuanced, and to imagine it in the conventional way is very hard in the context of Ukraine. So this is why you have to be open to understanding where something might take you, and be able to adapt. 

We work with Kollektiv Scrollan to design the magazine, and we also try to organise panel discussions and other events. We have realised that a community has assembled around the magazine, and in order to uphold the values that we push within the magazine, we need to create physical spaces for dialogue. 

What’s the wider cultural realm in Kyiv like?

Sebastian Wells: It's still quite active, perhaps surprisingly. Even in the context of war there are many things happening. For instance, in two weeks we will participate in the Kyiv Artbook Fair. Or there is the big book fair, Kyiv Book Arsenal, which has a lot of events dedicated to publishing practices. So somehow culture does still exist. 

Historically speaking, cultural activity, cultural practice, and war are not necessarily contradictory. In the last issue we were engaging with the Bosnian context, what was happening in the ‘90s there, and the culture that existed at that time. It’s not that culture exists in opposition to war, or as something inherently political, it’s that culture is part of everything, and part of the whole ecosystem of everyday life. It shouldn’t be surprising that there’s a lot going on here at the moment. It doesn’t feel like, ‘Wow, people are still doing culture,’ it feels like, ‘Of course this is happening, because how can it not happen?’ 

This is also a moment when artists are actually supposed to do the biggest amount of work; it’s the time when we have to work. After the full-scale war here, the arts and culture has been blooming, but obviously everything has been marked by war, and that becomes a big mix of everything. It's an attempt to document things, document feelings, create spaces for grief, and make sense of what is going on. Obviously we understand that the war is something that can never be grasped fully, so it's an ongoing reflection. It’s been changing too. I remember in 2022, as the word broke out, there was a big upheaval and big sense of defiance. Then, as you keep going, reality changes, the initial shock fades, but it still influences everything. So I feel that culture, and the response, is truly a living creature.

How have you felt that the magazine has evolved since you started? 

Vsevolod Kazarin: I think that in the beginning, and it wasn’t only our magazine, but there was a general tendency in the Ukrainian cultural response to the full-scale invasion that was quite reactive. A lot of things were happening at the same time; it was this moment when your ordinary life turned into a state of emergency, and people were trying to adapt to this new state. Many people produced art, texts, or other reflections on the war, but they were very quick, because there was this feeling that you don't have a lot of time, you need to grasp your thoughts or the emotional reaction that you have, and then put it into some form. 

With time the full-scale invasion, which we all thought was not going to last so long, has turned from a state of emergency into the new normality. Adapting to this normality has prompted longer and more lasting reflections. For instance, in the second issue of the magazine we turned to the past, so we researched how Ukrainian youth faced the war that started in 2014, and what happened to those who were displaced from the parts of the country that were occupied in that time. 

By the third issue of the magazine, there was a sense of exhaustion in the air, because the war had continued for quite a long time already. There was a sort of weariness of war, both in Ukraine, but also, in a different way, outside of Ukraine, because it had spent so long as the topic on the first pages of the newspaper. It felt that people were tired of talking about it, and so we felt that the third issue might be our last. Then in 2023 Russia attacked the Kakhovka Dam, which led to a big ecological disaster, which prompted us to make a special issue dedicated to the environment. When Trump became president in 2025 there were lots of discussions about the peace process and whether the war was going to end, and in a way the latest issue was a response to that. We were thinking about whether there was going to be a post-war future, and if so, in what way could we imagine and envision that future?

So the magazine reflects the reality which surrounds us, because the publishing process is quite long. In the time it takes us to publish a magazine here, we have some time to grasp what's happening around.

What mistakes have you made so far in this process, and what have you learned from them?

Andrii Ushytskyi: We have made many mistakes. In one sense, the whole magazine is a mistake. I feel sometimes that we’re doing something that we're not really, I don't want to say not allowed to do, but something that exceeds our own resources by a long way. We're only able to do this because, magically, our group came together, and we very much love what we're doing, and that helps us to keep going with very limited resources, but a lot of care, motivation and energy. So I think the whole magazine project is in a certain way not supposed to be a magazine – we don’t have the backing of any cultural institution, there's no one asking us to do it. 

In terms of the moments when we failed, and then we learned from that, maybe in the beginning we made mistakes in terms of who we wanted to reach. I think early on we had a bit of an activist mindset, we wanted to reach a Western audience, raise awareness, and so on. Very soon after that first issue, we understood that the people who most appreciated what we were doing were not necessarily the people that we wanted to reach at first, so this whole process has also been about understanding: who are we doing this for, who is interested in what we're doing beyond ourselves?