Radio Art Project “An Emotional Encyclopedia of War”

Thursday, November 28

19:00 – 21:00

Zemstvei Museum, Queer Café 1

*The event will be held in English

*Acces FREE OF CHARGE

An Emotional Encyclopedia of War is a radio art project launched in the summer of 2022 that investigates the transformation that comes with war via the locus of emotional emergency. Trying to get a grip on the new emotional states she had undergone, Anna Kravets still questions the imperceptibility of war experience. Having realized how discordant it is with the life beyond its borders, she tries to invent frameworks that would pass under the framing barriers of mass media coverage.

In her auto-ethnographic radio piece, Anna describes her feelings of living during war, integrating them in a palette of experiences which belong to others, strangers, foreigners. Called out in a time of war, those experiences are featured in her piece together with her desperate attempts of reflection and composing sound in a post-invasion paralysis.

The project was born during SONIC FUTURE RESIDENCIES program of SEMI SILENT, made possible together with Q-O2 and ASCR in Brussels, and co-financed by AFCN. In 2023, it traveled to CTM festival as part of its Radio Lab with Deutschlandfunk Kultur (winner of the 2022 edition), ORF musikprotokoll at steirischer herbst festival, Ö1 Kunstradio, The Wire magazine, and Goethe Institut. A new iteration of Emergency Rehearsal took place during Sonic Narratives festival in Timișoara (Romania) in 2023, and the Week of Sound in Brussels and Charleroi in 2024.

An Emotional Encyclopedia of War was premiered (in German) in February 2024 at Deutschlandradio Klangkunst. The English version (original) is published by SEMI SILENT (semisilent.ro)


Voices, contributors, and participants: Aditi Srivastava, Alessandra Prado Soler, Alice Hui-Sheng Chang, Amin Behmanesh, Annu Koetter, Carmelo Ianuzzo, Caroline Profanter, Constanze Aka, Diana Duta, Dimitra Kousteridou, Erika Sirola, Golo Föllmer, Greg Kieser, Hanna Sauer, Joachim Glaude, Julia Eckhardt, Juliette Escudé, Kai-Uwe Reinhold, Laetitia Defendini, Mamoru Watanabe, Michel Ivor, Nir Jacob, Sabri Meddeb, Tanya Ringer, Virgile Loiseau, Wouter Hillaert, and Wynona Ringer.

The voices were collected in different places from 2022 onward as part of Emergency Rehearsal series of performative interactions, that became a tool for mutual translation and acknowledgement of complicated experience.

Production: SEMI SILENT, Q-O2, ACSR, Deutschlandfunk Kultur, CTM Festival, Goethe-Institut, and ORF

Final mix: Nika Zenova 


Anna Kravets is a radio and performance artist, journalist and podcast producer. In her work, she uses direct and recorded speech, stages recorded interactions, makes sonic experiments with materials, spaces and soundscape, exploring the experience of the self with its limits and possibilities. Anna studied cultural studies in Kyiv and anthropology in Marseille. In 2017-2022, Anna presented the Art Of Work Talk Show on Radio Ukraine International and Cashmere Radio. In 2017-2018, Anna also produced and organized an experimental media platform called Radio International during the Kyiv Biennial and the Warsaw Under Construction Festival. Anna is based in Kyiv, Ukraine.