Victoria Amelina Fellow 2025

INDEX - Spring 2025 1 April – 30 June 2025

Kateryna Iakovlenko is a Ukrainian writer, visual culture researcher, curator, and former Editor-in-Chief of the Suspilne Culure website. During her fellowship at INDEX, Iakovlenko worked on her creative non-fiction book Donbas as a Metaphor. According to the author, both the title and the book itself respond to the thesis of Ukrainian writer and historian Olena Stiazhkina—a native of Donetsk Oblast—who asserted that Donbas does not exist. The author specifically uses this geographic marker to direct her reflections on her native landscapes toward a place that is not only physically inaccessible to her, but also historically and artificially identified with its name.

The Donbas the author observes is the landscape of Donetsk and Luhansk regions, complete with its own histories and language—one that can sometimes be heard and reconstructed, while at other times only traced through the remnants of events and phenomena that are no longer accessible, or to which access was always obscured. The book was published in 2026 by ist publishing.

Kateryna Iakovlenko

Victoria Amelina Fellow at INDEX 2025, former Editor-in-Chief of the website of the Ukrainian public broadcaster Suspilne Culture, writer, visual curator, and researcher of contemporary art. Her achievements include: editing the book Why There Are Great Women Artists in Ukrainian Art, as well as several essays in publications such as e-flux, London Ukrainian Review, Institute of Networks Culture, The Ecologist, and others. She is the author of the libretto Those Who Saw Death published by ilostmylibrary, and the non-fiction book Donbas as a Metaphor, published by ist publishing (2026) and completed during her fellowship at INDEX. In the book, Iakovlenko explores films, artworks, literary pieces, and imagery that unfold the metaphor of Donbas for readers.