The artist Tobias Zielony visited Kyiv in 2017 for a series of conversations and portraits of the underground queer and techno scene. His series “Maskirovka” documents the complex reality of Ukrainians and the conflicting claims of diverse actors struggling to occupy the country’s contested symbolic and political space. Zielony uses the term maskirovka, commonly referring to a Russian tradition of covert warfare and military deception, to describe Russian politics toward Ukraine since the Maidan Uprising.

The “hybrid war” in eastern Ukraine has never been officially declared, yet in Crimea the masked special forces, so-called “green men”, occupied Ukrainian territory. Masks also played a crucial role in protecting the Maidan protesters from tear gas, and helped to hide their identities from the authorities. The portraits and still lifes reveal the fragile and treacherous situation in which the protagonists live and act in the city in Kyiv. When we read these conversations today, we can visit a time that is past – and really not. The aftermath of the 2013 Maidan Uprising, reflected in these conversations, is still present. This war, these conversations show, has been going on for at least eight years. This is his interview with Tasia on partying.

Tobias Zielony and Tasia on Partying.

Some people describe the party world in Kyiv as escapism, as creating a second reality, in order not to deal with the violent reality of a country at war. I know you don’t agree. Are there any moments that you remember when the so-called outside world has broken into the reality of the club?

Last weekend at Closer [a nightclub] there was a German DJ called PLO Man. He was playing Chicago house, a very elaborate style, good techniques, and I had this feeling of a magical moment of the here and now. Then I saw, at the culmination of one track, a guy and a girl surrounded by the crowd: he proposed, and they started kissing. It was this kind moment, the coming together of continents and times. House music has been revived from the 1990s. Then the guy from Berlin brought it to Ukrainian people, living through dancing, and this pair got engaged right in front of us. Then everyone surrounded them and started cheering; that’s how we knew they were getting engaged. It’s a nice story. Sad stories are when you witness the guards at the door having to reject visitors who are drunk and still want to get in, or who are arrogant and want to bring in weapons. There are some guys who would surely come in with their weapons.

Did you see anything like that? What kind of weapon?

Yes. A gun. A real shooting gun.

Had he just come home from the war and had it with him?

You never know if he came from the war or if he just had it. In this country, where we have a war, guns are much more easily available. You don’t have to be a soldier to be able to buy a gun. That’s the situation we witness now in Ukraine, in my local area for example. Instead of bookshops and grocery stores, you have flower shops open twenty-four hours a day and gun shops opening.

Our country has a failed social system. The people have built networks of mutual support that take the place of the nonexistent social institutions provided by the nation.

You said something about time, things coming together. Dance, music, and trance can create moments when you jump out of time. In a sense this is the old idea of the avantgarde, where you move beyond time. But to me it seems that Ukrainians would rather say, “There is no tomorrow, so let’s party now.”

I wouldn’t say that’s the way I see it. I would say that for me, time and space are a unity that should not be torn apart or put into contradiction. For me, it’s two measures of the wave. It depends on how you perceive matter, as a wave or as a particle; it depends on where you put the two coordinates — time and space. You have the feeling, when you live into the music, that you are a particle in the larger wave. For me, this escape into the music, into making art, living through art, letting art go through you, is much more a conscious choice than an escape from the war. Because when you get into the situation, you can be forced to kill or be killed at any moment. Getting out of it, and entering into the situation of art, is also a pretty conscious choice where you can live through or become a victim of other things, but you consciously take yourself out of this masculine aggression. So for me, there’s lots of consciousness in this choice. I can see that lots of people have quit their commercial, high-skilled jobs, and didn’t go to the front just to be able to live out their aspirations from earlier times, the 1990s and 2000s. They went into this unstable ground of the art business and became fashion designers, musicians, dancers, party organizers; they became myth creators such as myself. It’s also a world where you can really lose things. You can lose everything from one day to the next.

What do you mean by that?

Money, status. When you are part of an established company, you have the protection of the company’s name and reputation. You also have the protection of health insurance. When you get out into the world of independence, you don’t have any protection, any backup. You don’t have customers because downloading music for free, or going to free parties, or buying clothes second hand are always options in an anarchistic country like ours. So you really trust your people, and they likewise trust you by putting their last money into going to your party, or maybe going into debt to buy your clothes. So it’s what we have now, this war situation, where we are in many ways left behind, left alone by our government, and maybe by foreign governments. The only people to trust are ourselves. This is what we rely on, with a feeling of pride.

Would you say that the country has achieved more independence since the Maidan revolution in 2013 and 2014? It seems that not everybody is adapting to this new and often wild situation.

There is no “everybody.” There are islands of support and independence and freedom, but also a codependency. Our country has a failed social system. We the people have built non-registered networks of mutual support that take the place of the nonexistent social institutions provided by the nation. So there are sparks of stability, and sparks of normality and support, that we ourselves build and rely on. We don’t see it as stability. To imagine what you will do as a retired person, or the pension that you will get, now seems almost ridiculous since you don’t know how you’ll be living three years from now.

There is total uncertainty about what tomorrow could be like, or will feel like?

We try to envision our tomorrow as less wild and more supportive. More matriarchal in a way. We try to live with this vision and not look at our lives as just today. We try to build this small territory around us, but we really don’t see the day after tomorrow, only tomorrow.

As you’re talking about creating myths and the party/techno scene, is there a difference between the myth of it—the myth that it’s creating itself—and the so-called reality of it?

I don’t see any mythology here. It’s the wave rave coming, and it is techno, house, trance. Those three main qualities or iterations of EDM are tangibly here and they’re a revival from the early 1990s, the late 1980s. They’re not as mythological. Well, the mythology is the earlier part that you build upon, that you take samples from, or icons from. But actually I don’t see much mythology in it.

If you are a techno person, you are a cyborg first, a dancer, and then you have some sexual identity.

I agree. In the West, we’re in this time of postmodernity, but the idea of referencing, picking parts, is very conscious somehow. Whereas here I see it more as a necessity to pick up and create new identities, without a shared framework. Not because it’s fashionable but because it’s how things developed. Why do you think this kind of culture was picked up upon? Why techno and not—?

I have my own ideas. Because it is very imaginative, for one. You can come from a rich background, or a normal background, or an industrial and working-class and deprived-of-everything background and still get into this. It just takes you a few years to learn how to make the music. It takes maybe three or four parties for you to learn how to dance. You can establish yourself without having any great capital, you just have to be able to express yourself through sound production and dancing.

What makes a good dancer?

Being able to trust your body, and express sound through movement. Being relaxed and able to pick up the patterns but also experiment with the basics. It’s important that you know your basics but also important that you’re able to go out of the pattern. And there is nothing better than coming together and celebrating and having this ecstatic, tribal, archaic, Paleolithic feeling of trance, unification. And of course what unites you is love: you want to be united in love, with the people who come from Russia, from the EU, rather than to be separated by war. That’s one more reason to escape into it.

Why is the techno scene the place for the queer community to come out and meet?

If you are a techno person, you are a cyborg first, a dancer, and then you have some sexual identity. Also when you dance together, rub your asses against each other, press your breasts against each other, sweat upon and touch each other, you can’t be homophobic. You cannot be anti-lesbian if you are around all the girls rubbing and kissing. And actually, because you also have this extended consciousness and prolonged feeling of love and unity, you cannot be afraid of the persons you were afraid of before.