rc101 dispatch: a drone is not a drone is not a drone.
Eight Ukrainian artists turning imperial erasure into reconnaissance.
On my travels to book shows and lectures, I always pick up a bunch of interesting books and meet fascinating people. Recently, I had a thought: what if I start sharing all of it with my subscriber family here? This is how the rc101 dispatch format became a thing. Let me know what you think, and whether it is of any value to you — via the chat link below.
here is what’s in store for you this week:
(estimated reading time: 7 min)
The documented operational method of russian colonialism — and eight Ukrainian artists in Prague who refuse to let it run unopposed.
"You can't just survive; you must maintain your authenticity"
Flying robots rebuilt into guardian angels — and what that tells us about the Ukrainian resistance.
‘I explore the phenomenon of the European Dream as a means of escape from the past of Soviet colonialism and current Russian imperialism.’
Luckily, I am not one of those Ukrainians who have been hunted by russian flying robots, like those ‘human safaris’ in Kherson, Nikopol or Izuim. But once I understood a swarm of drones was hanging above me, I froze. It took some time for my brain to process that I was looking at an art installation, not a threat.
Olga Krykun's Guardian Angel Butterfly hangs in the exhibition hall at UMPRUM, a leading Czech arts academy in Prague, where I recently gave a guest lecture on russian colonialism. It is made from drone components — the same class of machines that have recently altered the war in Ukraine and modern warfare at large.
The exhibition text contains one sentence: behind every drone stands a human. An hour before the war, they were neighbours, siblings, friends. Ukrainians take what the empire sends against them and rebuild it into something that guards. However, that is not a poetic metaphor. It is the operational logic of Ukrainian anti-colonial resistance, coded into Ukrainian resistance art.
Technology, no matter how revolutionary, does not alone define a new era of modern warfare. Intent does. The same unmanned arms systems the russian empire deploys to erase Ukrainian civilian lives are what Ukrainian democracy uses to defend it — identical tech, opposite culture and mindset directing it. The robot is neutral. The system operating it is not.
Krykun’s installation and my guest lecture opened ‘An Hour from Here,’ one of the most important Ukrainian art events in Prague since 2022, featuring a new generation of local diaspora artists and curated by a Ukrainian-Czech artist Darja Lukjanenko. They bridge the past and present of the Ukrainian anti-colonial resistance in a city that has served as a refuge for Ukrainian thought and culture many times in the last several centuries. I want to feature several artists from the show for you in this dispatch - their resistance art is an effective explainer of the imperial nature of russian invasion of Ukraine.
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