Nina Boichenko

I have been quite good at art since I was a child, but I have never pursued this interest until recently. Research and aid work on the humanitarian crisis on the Polish-Belarusian border led me to seek additional means of expression, and I took up painting. Since then I have identified myself as a member of both the research and artistic communities. Due to my academic work, my activities consist mainly of absorbing and processing information from the outside world. A year ago I felt a strong need to change the direction of this flow, to sublimate, to externalise myself, to pour out what is inside me by creating art. During the residency I would like to explore this and try to identify and understand what I need. I am fascinated by the interdisciplinary and holistic nature of science and art. I am passionate about education and outreach. Above all, I need to be looked after and feel safe during my residency. I would also like to explore the changes taking place within me. As a result of my huge involvement in the humanitarian crisis on the Polish-Belarusian border, I have been functioning in a state of chronic stress since 2021, which directly affects my body. Using the financial support provided for the process, I would like to work with psychosomatics and pay for physical therapy and psychological support.

I am originally from Kyiv and have lived in Poland for the past ten years. I graduated in Cultural Studies and Psychology from the M.P. Dragomanov National Pedagogical University in Kyiv and earned a Master’s degree in Cultural Studies from the Jagiellonian University. I am currently a PhD candidate in Interdisciplinary Humanities at the Polish Academy of Sciences, and my research interests include borderlands, national minorities and migration from a sociolinguistic perspective. I am writing my dissertation on the refugee experience and adaptation processes in the narratives of Ukrainian IDPs (2014–2021). I co-founded the inter-university project Researchers on the Border (Badacze i Badaczki na Granicy BnG), which focuses on the humanitarian crisis on the Polish-Belarusian border. Since 2019, I have been a regular collaborator of the Centre for Migration Research at the University of Warsaw, where I have held coordinating, research and mentoring roles. My research and academic interests include modes of communication and linguistic constructions between actors involved in (or entangled with) migration processes.

I came to the residency after experiencing a mental health crisis as a result of my work on the Polish-Belarusian border. I was working with a group called Researchers on the Border. After the escalation of the war in Ukraine, I realised that I was burning myself out. It was emotionally and mentally challenging for me to work there, and this situation challenged me and showed me that almost all of my research is about violence. I wondered about the source of my professional choices. I had never thought about it before, but now I realise that I had to look at my history and decide how to work to function and develop healthily. It was an important discovery for me—I altered some of the projects I was working on.

My residency at the Warsaw Observatory of Culture (WOK), was mainly about taking stock. It was a time for reflection on what kind of work I like and an inventory of all the projects I have been involved in. I went through my emails and sorted them. Because of the ad hoc nature of my work, I often jump from one project to another, so it is easy to lose track of time and have no idea what you were doing a year or even six months ago.

I have never looked at what I do in terms of whether I enjoy it, and that became the number one criterion for the stock-taking process. I used non-digital tools to do it. I have a wall at home where I post different things and discoveries, which helps me notice connections and similarities between them that escaped me. This method allowed me to see what worked better for me in specific projects. This became the motto of this residency for me. It was a review of sorts of my professional life. I managed to create a personal database in one place that I could look at after taking three steps back.

I feel I am on the verge of a breakthrough, and a break from my current work was much needed. I realised that a crisis is a situation where the tools I have used daily have become useless. The residency has also allowed me to see which tools work and which do not. Now it is time to put these lessons into practice.

At times, it was inspiring just to see someone else complete a stage of their work and know that I could do it. We were able to learn from and inspire each other. I think this residency brought together some very ambitious but lost people—it was important to give ourselves those six months to rediscover ourselves a bit, or at least to get used to being lost and understanding that this is actually normal.

It was vital for me to take the pressure off myself. I also got a lot out of what other residents said about self-cannibalism, about beating yourself up for not fulfilling your commitments or not believing in the legitimacy of the task. This is especially true if you do not have a full-time job and do not have a role model or mentor at work to show you that you are doing your job correctly; for example, they might tell you that you are a good employee because you have been working in the office for eight hours. You must use other methods if you do not have a benchmark you can relate to. Remarkably, there is an institution that takes that pressure off you and shows you that you can do it without remorse. This is what I take away from my WOK residency and plan to apply in my future work. I hope that other institutions will start to work in this way.

I hope that this is the change I have experienced, the understanding that an institution does not have to be violent, that it can work on entirely different principles, that the results of such cooperation can be even better, and that working together can bring a lot of fun and joy. Every time I left the WOK premises, I had a smile on my face, which, to be honest, is not very common in my encounters with other institutions.