It’s 2:44 am. An air siren cuts through the clear night sky over Kyiv and into my sleep. Heart pounding, I rise out of bed in my seventh-floor room of the Hotel Rus. Feeling like I’m on autopilot, I walk down the stairs to the bomb shelter. Chairs are lined up in orderly rows in this basement that was once a gym. But only one elderly man in jogging pants with a travel cushion around his neck sits here.
I quietly take a seat next to him and try to figure out the threat level on my newly installed Kyiv Air Alert App. The air threat persists, but tonight people seem to have decided that sleep is more important. I, too, resolve to return to my room. I have to be awake for my lecture tomorrow at the Pinchuk Art Centre, a well-known international museum for contemporary art in Kyiv.
The lecture is the reason I am in Kyiv. As a professor of culture and technology at the University of Southern Denmark, I was invited to speak about my research on drone art.
