Description
This paper examines cultural spaces – physical and social environments where people gather around creative practice – as underexplored sites of ontological security in the context of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. While current ontologies of war understate civilian agency, cultural spaces reveal communities actively resisting oppression while simultaneously building independent futures. Drawing on the place-biographies of selected cultural spaces, interviews with cultural practitioners, and participants' oral histories, this paper demonstrates how these sites simultaneously decolonise memory from Soviet and Russian dominance while enabling citizens to imagine alternatives. It shows that they do so by offering environments for expressing new ideas, experimenting with new perspectives, and contributing to collective senses of normalcy and agency. In an act of "radical hope", these "spaces of imagination" empower resistance against an aggressor attempting to erase Ukraine's past, present, and future. This transforming role of cultural spaces further reveals the intimate relationship between heritage, place, and identity, while demonstrating how war alters public cultural functions.
