BL8D VOL.

INTRO

Before our eyes, numerous myths that had been telling us for a long time about the effectiveness of colonial empires that actively "cared" for their "subjects" have finally crumbled and turned into dust.

We witnessed how the “bright future” doctrines that society slipped us in the form of a quick-acting sedative eventually led to devastating consequences.

The dreams of a large number of people on the planet are not connected with the Future but with the desire to return to the illusion of a calm past or with the wish that "all of this would be finally over"

Looking around, it seems that our ability to see the world as IT COULD BE has disappeared, and our need to dream has been abolished, turning into an unnecessary tool, a game of escapism.

At the same time, every day the living dead with their fantasies “About their own greatness” pass off to Mankind miserable shams of an effective world order.

The poet Rilke wrote that "the future enters into us to be transformed in us long before it happens”.

But firstly let's admit that at the moment we are tightly stuck in Timelessness, like in some bad dream or just like in the magic wardrobe from the Chronicles of Narnia.

This means that if we want to live in a better society and in a better future, we need to start imagining it now.

And what prevents us from getting out of this damned closet, like a lost key, is the answer to the question “Who am I?”

Am I my nationality? Are the traditions of my ancestors the shackles of personal freedom or the foundation of self-identification? Is my only life the main value, or am I ready to die for the country I was born in? Can I give up my family, friends, my favorite job in order to be able to tell the truth, or am I ready to remain silent, try to adapt in order to wait out the “difficult times”? Do I believe that killing people is the absolute evil, or do I believe that the absolute Truth does not exist? Do I believe in the State or in myself? What am I most afraid of? Will I be able to create the Future if my Past ceases to exist?

Reader, in VOl.2 there are 6 completely different ways (scenarios) of living the experience of self-identification in an era of total turbulence.

6 chapters, 6 dialogues with 6 different artists, each of whom was once born in the epicenter of an “Empire”, and then found themselves “on the other side”, literally outside, out of the system.

We invite you not only to observe these conversations, but also to gather the courage to ask, with us, not the most pleasant questions, without the answers to which the path to the Future is closed.

In this issue, just like in the first one, a special place is given to how war destroys the Present, changes the attitude towards the Past and triggers irreversible processes of both a general humanitarian and a deep internal crisis.

We dedicate this issue to those who are trying to create, despite the enormous fear of the unknown. for whom the question of the Future, its very possibility, directly depends on the answer to the question “Who am I?”