Theater Nafta (UA)
CYBORG ORGY - The Last Show of the Anthropocene

When weapons pierce equally through the concrete of buildings, the stems of plants, the flesh of animals and humans; when the metals and sulfur from rockets flying above us and exploding nearby infiltrate the soil, bones, water, and blood — are we capable of noticing the others, the non-humans, who suffer destruction just the same as we do? The immeasurable, quite literally, losses of nameless creatures, organisms, and ecosystems continue every day, remaining unpunished. And honestly, we do not know what to do about it. So we do what we know — we go on stage with a theatrical show to name the crimes, mourn their victims, and bear witness to a disaster that is growing and demands our response.

The large-scale and long-term damage that Russia inflicts on Ukraine’s environment through its military actions — such as the destruction of the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Dam in 2023 — is an act of ecocide that demands exposure. By performing war stories that include non-human agents, we expand the understanding of post-war justice, its temporality, and its potential to embrace more-than-human worlds. We will not be able to achieve complete justice or fully restore what has been destroyed, but we can build networks of support and restore our relationships with the environments around us.

In her famous “A Cyborg Manifesto”, a feminist scholar and cultural critic Donna Haraway describes modern war as a "cyborg orgy." Within the space of war, we witness how rapidly the environment transforms into a hybrid of machines and living organisms. In our own biotope, we already coexist closely with military technologies—weapons, programs, codes. A shared threat draws us closer to animals and exposes our interdependence. The image of the cyborg that we borrow from Haraway is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid that exists within a dual natural-artificial world, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. It reflects both our social and bodily reality and serves as a resource of imagination — one rich in generative connections, which we now need more than ever for our collective survival.