Within the framework of the exhibition SCARLET HORIZON, a series of conversations begin in Berlin and will continue in Kyiv and other cities.

Between openness and control, poetry and power, the sky emerges as a temporary field of reflection. Contemporary shifts in warfare and technological development have transformed it into a constant zone of interaction and risk. Ukraine has become an “AI laboratory” of modern warfare, while Europe increasingly recognizes the need to defend peace independently—as by 2025, drones had already entered the airspace of Germany and other European countries.

As rockets and fireworks rupture the sky and the struggle for survival forces bodies underground, a fundamental question arises: Will the sky be irreversibly torn apart by human action, or can it reclaim freedom—for itself and for us?

The program features the performative lecture Lands of the Dying Stars by Morgane Billuart, which explores the new constellations inhabiting the sky today. From SpaceX and Starlink to engineered satellite formations and drones falling lifeless across fields of war, a new technological ecology of alignment and illumination emerges. In an era some describe as the Dark Enlightenment, cosmologies appear and disappear across the sky, activating astrologers and astronomers alike. What was once distant and unreachable is now densely populated by technological beings—flying, harvesting, surveilling, and at times collapsing
back to Earth.

A subsequent discussion Who Owns the Sky? with Berlin-based artists participating in the exhibition, moderated by the curator, examines how the sky has shifted from a symbolic commons into a contested infrastructural territory shaped by satellites, drones, missile defense systems, and AI technologies. The conversation reflects on how these transformations reshape time, perception, and imagination—and where it is still possible to search for air to breathe freely in a world undergoing compression by conflict, control, and restriction, where peace can no longer be taken for granted.

Within this context, contemporary art is approached as a counter-space: a site that confronts alienation, restores sensibility, and opens new intersubjective and spatial connections—allowing us to reimagine our relationship to the sky, to one another, and to the  fragile conditions of shared existence.

// PROGRAM
:: 18:00 Intro and wine
:: 18:30 Performative lecture “Lands of the Dying Stars” by Morgane Billuart
:: 19:00 Discussion “Who Owns the Sky?” with Norman Behrendt, Ossian Fraser, Sofiia Holubeva, Fabian Knecht, Tetiana Malinovska, Masha Pryven and Daria Prydybailo

// with MORGANE BILLUARTO

Morgane Billuart is a writer, researcher, and storyteller whose work navigates the intersection of critical inquiry and narrative practice. Her practice spans writing, visual media, and sound, exploring how technology shapes contemporary modes of imagination, perception, and social relation. She is an affiliated researcher at the Institute of Network Cultures and the New Center for Research and Practice, and co-hosts the podcast GirlEmployee with Carmen Lael Hines. Her publications include Cycles, The Sacred and the Doomed, and Becoming the Product (Set Margins), reflecting a sustained engagement with the material, ethical, and cultural entanglements of technology in contemporary life.

Daria Prydybailo is an art historian and independent curator, living and working in Kyiv and Berlin. She has held positions at prestigious institutions, including Kyiv’s National Cultural and Museum Complex Mystetskyi Arsenal and Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart. She is the founder of the Temporarily Displaced Foundation.