Yevheniia Nesterovych (1988) is a cultural manager, critic, and writer. She was born in Hadiach, Poltava region. She was a co-editor of the culture page at the Zbruc.eu (2013-2018), a program director at the NGO Art Council Dialogue (2015-2021), and a program coordinator at the Czech Center in Kyiv (2020-2022). In 2016, in collaboration with Yuriy Izdryk, she published the book Summa (Meridian Czernowitz). Since May 2022, she has led the team of the Post Bellum Ukraine NGO.
When asked about her thoughts about the Krasngogruda residency, she says: During my residency stay, I could primarily enjoy the healing silence and the nature of the Borderland. I did need such an open space in order to have a look at everything that I have written and done so far in the recent years. Since the Russian full scale invasion on Ukraine in 2022 I was forced to work more as a manager rather than a writer. Many of my ideas, especially the idea concerning writing fiction were merely short notes on the margin of more engaging work that was needed in order to launch the Ukrainian section of the international archive of oral history, memoryofnations.eu. For the last three years I have been in charge of the Post Bellum-Ukraine NGO and during this time we have managed to collect nearly 200 testimonies, produce two films, one international exhibition and several media projects.
During my stay in Krasnogruda I finally managed to put some order into my writings, sketches and notes and I had the time, the energy and the friendly milieu to work on the essay on the experience of documenting female oral history war testimonies. In 2024 my team and I were working on the project The Guards of Memory: the Female Experience in the Donetsk Region in the 20th and 21st century. In the project we collected and worked on the testimonies of 27 women aged between 40 to 79 from the city Krematorsk. IT was a complicated, serious and interdisciplinary project into which seven different teams were engaged and which demanded from us a lot of mindful listening, careful editing of the material and establishing safe conditions for discussions on these delicate kinds of experience. I found it very important to put my thoughts in order and present my reflections about this particular work so that it would not be forgotten and could be helpful to other colleagues working on similar issues.