Behind every recording, there is a moment of ordinary life.

Ukrainian filmmaker and artist Daria Zhuravel’s practice explores vulnerability, the experience of time, and the fluid boundaries between documentary and fiction. Her listening performance, Perfect Explosion Or I Stop When It Gets Too Loud, taking place this June at Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, accompanies the exhibition Pedagogies of War by Roman Khimei and Yarema Malashchuk as one in the series of “nocturnal walkthroughs” designed to offer visitors a way to engage with the exhibition in an intimate, immersive setting where contemplation and shared experience take center stage. In Perfect Explosion, Zhuravel utilizes a sound archive of attacks on Ukrainian cities collected by Ukrainian multidisciplinary artist and filmmaker Ihor Babaiev since 2022, taking on the role of a fictional archivist who guides the audience through a collective listening session where personal reflections fill the intervals between the sounds of war. 

Your performance is part of the public program accompanying the exhibition by Roman Khimei and Yarema Malashchuk, who work with audiovisual material to expose the fragility of peace and show how violence shapes identity and everyday life. This articulation of tension and uncertainty seems to resonate with your work as well. How do you approach these subjects? 

I am certainly inspired by Roman and Yarema's work. They work through very distinct conceptual imagery. I feel close to working in a space where I deliberately blur reality and fiction. For me, this is a way to expose the limitations of a binary understanding of war and peace – to speak about how the reality of war is much more complex than it is usually perceived from a distance.

War is black-and-white only at the level of basic political clarity. Once you move beyond that – and begin to analyze how war unfolds over time and seeps into everyday life – there is an ocean of ambiguity. In my practice, I also approach these questions in relation to time, because war directly reshapes our sense of it. It’s perhaps the least visible, but deeply felt transformation – and it’s what leads me to work with pauses and temporal structures.

“Perfect Explosion” is a listening performance, based on a sound archive of missiles, artillery, and drone strikes in Ukrainian cities, collected by Ihor Babaiev since 2022. How did this collaboration spring to life?

Ihor is a close friend of mine. He often works with the sound of war in his projects, and he’s also a musician. We met in Kyiv after the full-scale invasion started, at a film festival, and after that, we began talking a lot and exchanging ideas, so I knew that he was also documenting Russian attacks through sound. When we expected another massive attack to be coming, I knew that he would not go to a shelter, but would probably place a recorder on his balcony, if he was home and not asleep. Now that he has joined the army, since we developed this idea when we already knew he was going, I wanted these recordings to continue to play a role. 

What role does sound play in conveying an experience?

In this work, sound is not only something to be heard, but something that operates conceptually. It is a documented war crime that continues to circulate – moving further and further away from the moment of impact. As it circulates, it begins to acquire new qualities: it becomes “suitable” or “not suitable,” familiar or unfamiliar, usable, categorizable. And yet, it never stops being a record of violence.

Behind every recording, there is a moment of ordinary life – people who heard it in real time, who were asleep, or whose lives were altered by that specific strike. 
In the performance, we evaluate these sounds together in a deliberately constructed way. It may seem like we are focusing on how they sound – but in fact, how they sound is not the point at all.

What choices influenced this archive?

I think the key choice is the decision to treat every recorded second as a form of testimony, and also a form of exposure. It is shaped by concrete conditions: where the body is positioned, whether you decide to stay or to hide, whether you are listening attentively or just reacting. A choice to record instead of turning away from this experience. And maybe the most important one – to believe that even fragments, even incomplete or random recordings, still carry meaning. They are not just documents, but traces of presence, attention, and risk that continue to circulate.

Can fictionalization reflect on the normalization of violence? What is the role of fiction in conveying this narrative?

I think that any artwork that enters into a dialogue with reality is already a blend of fact and fiction. There is no pure documentation, and there is no pure fiction – it is always shaped by subjectivity. For me, fictionalization is not about distancing reality, but rather about making its structures more visible. It allows you to see how violence is absorbed into everyday life – how it becomes ordinary, almost unnoticeable. So yes – it doesn’t just reflect the normalization of violence, it exposes the processes through which it becomes normal. It also implicates the viewer, because this process doesn’t happen outside of us, but through the way we perceive.

In this performance, fiction is a necessity first of all. I can simply come to Madrid and perform this work – Ihor cannot do it easily. So the fictionalized persona becomes a way to hold that absence, while allowing his presence to remain within the work through the recordings, the decisions behind them, and the position from which they were made.

At the same time, it helps to create a closer and more accessible context for the audience I invite into the act of listening. 

More broadly, I think fiction allows you to confront what you, as an artist, consider important – not only to represent something, but to position yourself in relation to it. In Perfect Explosion, fiction creates a space that makes it possible to speak about things that are otherwise too direct or too immediate. It also exposes the situation itself – how trauma can become a usable resource, how the experience can be formatted, requested, condensed, and delivered.