In the project I am working on I use the word ‘collective’ very often. All people from Ukraine warn me for too much optimism using this word.

Dialogue, conversation, collaboration, collective goals, those are words that are somehow infected a little. The Soviet period is over. The people have been forced to think for the collective aims. And the world changed. Maybe difficult but interesting. ‘We want to be individuals. Unique. And if we have to collaborate too much the individual person will melt into something vague, something average.’

I hear it over and over again. There was only one exception: Maidan demonstrations. On Maidan the scale of the group became both the power and the attraction. But can you regain that feeling in Mariupol in a humanitarian urban project? ‘Of course not.’