Anastasiia

“Today, everything is political.”

Anastasiia Kosodii’s texts travel in historical arcs to follow traces of memory and examine the current political changes. They are always driven by questions about origins and about the moments when the thread breaks or memories overlap and contradict each other. As a writer, curator and director, Kosodii has long been focusing on remote, forgotten and repressed stories and on how violence inscribes itself in societies, in minds and on paper.

Before the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Anastasiia Kosodii regularly worked with NGOs in eastern Ukraine, in cities now on the frontline of the war between Ukraine and Russia. In 2017, she was creative director of the Theatrical Laboratory: Behind the Borders of Fear project which created a space for theatre chiefly in Ukrainian cities bordering the then-occupied territories. In 2019, her play Time Traveller’s Guide to Donbas sent two time travellers from 2036 back to 2013 to search for the origins of the war in Donbas. She is one of the co-founders of the Theatre of Playwrights in Kyiv.