‘The Civic Pixel’: How Can a Veteran Start a New Life?

‘The civic pixel’ is a symbiosis of psychology and art that allowed 227 project participants to overcome their acute war traumas. The project consists of six months of sessions attended by psychologists, ATO veterans and their families and Kharkiv independent theater named Prekrasnye Tsvety [En.: The Beautiful Flowers].

‘Pixel’ is a slang name for a type of camouflage which the Ukrainian army is currently using. So ‘civic pixel’ is an attempt to translate the war time into the time of peace, from the frontline to the home, from the enemies to the families.

The project’s key objective is to adapt the combat experiences to everyday life, which consisted of three stages for each participant: the preparatory meeting, telling the stories of the veterans which were then acted out by the professional actors of the theater, feedback meeting to discuss impressions and outcomes.

The civic pixel has two major vectors: psychological (freeing of veterans’ emotions) and social (adaptation). The project is based on a psychodrama method that was invented by Romanian psychologist Jacob Moreno in the beginning of the XX century. In contrast to Freud's psychoanalysis Moreno’s psychodrama is a method of group therapy in which the patient is actively involved and has a mindset not only to transfer his existing emotion, but to accept an incoming emotion as well.

Actors of Prekrasnye Tsvety performing for participants of the Civic Pixel project in Kharkiv. Photo by repriza.com.ua

A person is guided out of the sterile security and isolation of the hospital room into a space where other patients, friends and family exist. The creativity becomes a uniting link, an intermediary between them. The unusual approach of the Civic Pixel is that patients were not directly involved in the acting, instead they were catalysts, a source of action for others, while being able to become an audience to their own story.

Other similar projects in Ukraine, which are also aimed at adaptation and trauma therapy, usually do not involve strangers — the work is performed in closed groups of people having some common traumatic experience.

The Civic Pixel is using another tactics, allowing its participants to see themselves from the side: it is your story, yet it is happening to a different person. This form of therapy is very specific, it requires not only the braveness to tell your own experience, but also trust to be able to accept another person, who might not understand the reality of combat action.

Ukrainian ATO veterans are facing a double barrier to socialisation: on one side it is ambiguous public reaction, fear and partial withdrawal, on the other side it is feelings of the veterans themselves, trauma and feeling that society does not need their story.

Projects like the Civic Pixel can overcome these barriers by helping  Ukrainian veterans to deal with their fears, tell their story, break out of the shell of their personal experiences and stop the isolation which society creates around the war and those who survived it.

Because of our militarization, which usually happened at an explosive rate, and our active inclusion in the war (physically or emotionally) we achieved a state of forgiveness, allowing these events and people to exist in a hermetically sealed place which developed regardless of our will. Yet every day people are coming back from the war and they have to face all their past experiences on their own.

Olena Lutsenko, lead psychologist of the project, emphasises a number of important effects which psychodrama therapy is creating. Primarily it is restoration of the social connections based on an opportunity to tell your story and create a frank dialogue with family and friends. The veterans had an opportunity to invite those to whom they wanted to tell their story and those, whose stories they would like to see and listen to.

Secondly, it is integration of the memories and experiences, as fragmentarity is typical for critical trauma experiences. The description of the event by a single team allowed each participant to restore the chronology of events, fill in the gaps and understand his or her role in the story. Another moment worth highlighting is the emotional response or release of the emotional tension by replaying and reliving the traumatic situation which was assisted by the professional actors.

Prekrasnye tsvety is an independent theatre based in Kharkiv which works in a unique self-invented manner of funk-futurism. All theatrical plays are build on gestures and mimics without any words. Actors of Prekrasnye tsvety introduced their manner of acting to the project, this allowed avoiding straightforward repeating of the stories and situations when difficult emotional moments become hostages of the verbal narrative.

The appropriation of the art as a therapy method brought about by the Civic Pixel can help us to discover another possible area of development of modern art. Yet this wonderful project is only one of the options which art could use to work with various communities helping them to be understood and assisting them with the posttraumatic socialization.

Translated by Gennadiy Kornev.

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