Natalie Nougayrède

Drawing from her experiences as a journalist who covered or reflected on crises and wars in the former Soviet space and beyond since the 1990s, Natalie Nougayrède will collect observations and descriptions from people she meets and situations she encounters in Ukraine to reflect on the notion of storytelling and the challenges that come from war being observed both from the outside and from the inside. Nougayrède aims to look into how storytelling manages (or not) to share experiences across various boundaries, as well as trying to connect some dots with other experiences of storytelling in times of war (Chechnya, Syria). In this way, shes hope to contribute to INDEX’s effort to not only document the war but also reflect on the “documentors” themselves. One of the starting points of this work is Hannah Arendt’s Humanity in Dark Times: “However much we are affected by the things of the world, however deeply they may stir and stimulate us, they become human for us only when we can discuss them with our fellows ... We humanize what is going on in the world and in ourselves only by speaking of it, and in the course of speaking of it we learn to be human.”