When he was younger, Artem Shuskin danced as only electronic music enthusiasts can dance, letting himself be carried away for hours by that sequential rhythm that pierces your body, takes you away and lifts you up.
I met him almost a year ago, in April 2022 at the Moderna pizzeria in Dnipro. It had been almost three months since the Russian invasion and the customers had disappeared. The kitchen was still working, but it was barely able to serve pizzas. The customers had become citizens, compatriots who couldn't afford the food they needed. Moderna fed them for nothing, and Artem was there, handing out rations and attending to logistics.
He was a successful small business owner. He had founded Coover Box with a friend. He made luxury gift boxes. He served leading brands in several European countries and employed around thirty people. He was happy. He earned a good living and his company did not attract the attention of the authorities and oligarchs. He had a free field, and this is almost all that could be asked for in a doomed country like Ukraine before the war.
Artem not only spoke English, but also had valuable contacts and did not want to charge anything in exchange for introducing people to you and translating what they said. It was a white blackbird for any means of communication with limited resources.
Thanks to his help I met many artists and cultural managers. Artem believed and continues to believe that culture saves us. Without his help, she would not have known the power of the Ukrainian woman to forge identities and resist Russian aggression. I wrote about it in the Culture section of this newspaper. The report was titled Culture, the other war in Ukraine. Musicians and poets, illustrators and cultural managers spoke in it.
Artem asked me more questions than I could answer. He wanted to know what the situation was on the Donbas front, the area that I had visited a few days before meeting him. He longed for a hopeful answer. Was it worth resisting?
I didn't know what to say to him. It was impossible not to share in the enthusiasm of the resistance, but that was all. There were no answers for what was unpredictable, and still is.
The small community of the Moderna pizzeria has consolidated and diversified. Now, volunteers like Artem feed both the spirit and the body of their compatriots. They do not lose faith and prepare for reconstruction. They have no alternative. They don't know if victory is within reach, but they prepare for that day. They live more tomorrow than today. They are almost Buddhist. They believe that the future begins today and has their names written on it.
Artem and his Dnipro colleagues combine expectation with anxiety. The same has been done by other people I have met under the bombs of wars that are always unfair and unnecessary. Yemen is the same as Libya, Iraq as Chechnya or Bosnia-Heregovina.
The expectation is in our bodies and the hope is in our souls. I learned it by reading John Berger and talking to the people at the front. There are times, as in the case of Artem, when expectation and hope are mixed. Suffering prevents you from distinguishing the body from the mind, anxiety from illusion.
That's when culture saves you. If you have the humility to put yourself in their hands and let yourself be carried away without fully understanding it, without trying to control everything, you will reach the backwater, that space that the rivers open up on the banks, safe from the currents that drag logs and dead animals through the center. of the channel
Wars are survived within these limits and Artem knows it very well. He has traded electronic music for jazz and organizes concerts on Fridays in the middle of the afternoon so that the audience can go home before curfew. He believes that jazz is more suitable in wartime. "It's softer," says he-he, more relaxing, just what we need.
Artem has spent a few days visiting the cities and towns destroyed on the eastern front. Photograph the wreckage. He says it's needed by the time the rebuilding day comes. He retains hope and believes in victory.
Business has picked up a bit. Orders come in from time to time, enough to maintain a small but active workforce. Life makes its way.
He always does, and Artem is there to make it easy for him to create.
