DILEMMA - Mobile Academy of Dialogue - day 5

These are all different returns, and they probably do not end with the end of the spatial journey, they will continue to work, taking our meeting into different worlds and realities. On the last day we were leaving Uzhhorod, heading for a place with all the context of its land, going to Palanka Castle, a fortress from the 14th century, where the space, we thought so much about, became time and the other way around. Suddenly we saw Transcarpathia in the vastness and distance, volcanic fields ran on the wide panorama, the rooftops of Mukachevo, Orthodox peaks reflected the light far away, somewhere at the end grew misty floors. The view from the top was blurring as we drove into the depths, as a guests in the villages of Nizhne Selishche and Kwyst. We were meeting the idea in action, what was small was changing the world, and the parameters, scales and proportions were losing their old touchdown points. Petro Prygar, as a boy, learned the art of cheese making in Switzerland, returned to his native Transcarpathia to start a small, local artisan production that reinvented the place, its nature, its traditions, all in close proximity to the people, in harmony with the environment, the future, the ecology. A tiny bookstore and a store with products of the local cooperative, are there adjacent to buildings that serve as shelter for internal refugees in Ukraine. This remarkable organization, community energy and practice, has made it possible to organize a space for people fleeing the country's eastern territories, some staying for longer, some only for a while, but each of these people finds material shelter along with a place in the community of this small world. Moments before dusk, as we exited the tiny archives of the cheese factory, the sounds of Transcarpathian music reached us, with local musicians playing accordions and drums, and the melodies transformed into dancing, then singing, and finally a shared exchange of ideas. It's all too strange that one meeting can accommodate so many different, extreme emotions, running side by side, opposite, in the middle. Likewise, this day, although unrealistically green, peaceful and safe, is not a tale of an island unaffected by the evils of war. And again Raphael Roginskiy's sound story allowed a space for all this, we listened in concentrated silence to the songs of the Black Sea, in what was actually a tiny group, in a tiny world. We listened perhaps as one body, as Ivanka Skyba-Yakubova, a poet from Kharkiv, said.In this unity, we will return with other boundaries of imagination, the one about the war and the one about the new Europe, the future.We met life, which flows from the place, exists despite everything, transforming silence into the light.