In the second year of seemingly endless war and cruelty new bioisms arrived in my hometown. They arrive as the light of hope to Ukrainian doctors and nurses, who carry the daily burden of bloodshed. They arrive as kindness. They arrive inside the Central Hospital of Lozova in Kharkiv oblast, eastern Ukraine, where bombings and injuries shaped the tempo of every day and every hour. In this hospital new bioisms were suspended in five public spaces: three entrance halls, pediatrics and traumatology.
These new bioisms are addressed to Ukrainian women, medical workers, who heal wounds. They treat trauma and violence every day. They treat children. They treat the elderly. They treat soldiers. They treat everyone who survives another blast. War is an attack on biological life itself. Bioism is a refusal of that death logic. Bioism proposes new life chances. Bioism proposes possible new biological ethics. Bioism proposes unfamiliar tenderness and unfamiliar optimism.
This intervention is a forthcoming continuation of the charity project HOPE which started in Ukrainian special schools in March and April 2022. Then the project carried hope into spaces of future becoming. Now the project enters the hospital and carries hope into spaces of urgent care.
Philosophically this intervention insists that hope is not abstraction. Hope must be present in the middle of pain. Humanistically this intervention respects the moral weight of every nurse and every doctor in Ukraine who continues to choose life each morning. Hope is a biological material condition that will remain.
