Clara Amaral is an artist working with text and performance. Her interdisciplinary artistic practice questions what it means to be a reader, to be a writer, aiming to expand existing modes of reading, writing and publishing. Central to her practice is the investigation of publishing modalities and the performative aspect of writing and language, through an intersectional feminist approach. Her works have been presented in The Netherlands, Portugal, Austria, Belgium, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland.

"room of words" is an audio installation about the beauty of the Ukrainian language and its power, which becomes a pillar of support in difficult times. Like exchanging passwords at checkpoints, like in the children’s ball game of associations, two people tell each other Ukrainian words — melodic, poetic, beloved and gentle to the ear. Some of these words have been forgotten, some were repressed in soviet times, some have been displaced from usage in favor of those phonetically closer to foreign — often russian — synonyms. The installation is a play without a plot. The sequence of words is not random. The war speaks through it. The words you hear associatively recreate the whirlwind of events and states of 2022. By creating a chasm between the melodic sound of Ukrainian words and the painful reality of their meanings. Why do these beautiful words have such horrible meanings now?

Maria Matiashova is a Ukrainian interdisciplinary artist born in 1993 in Kyiv. Maria works at the intersection of various media, including video, photography, text, performance, installation, and public intervention. In her projects, she explores personal memory, identity issues, human relationships, language, and the effects of digital technology on social behavior. She is currently working on the subject of russia’s invasion of Ukraine.