When Ukrainian pianist and composer Vadim Neselovskyi wrote a suite dedicated to his hometown of Odesa, he never imagined it would take on political meaning.
The music, which predates Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, is a love letter to the Black Sea city where he grew up and to his father, who embodied its spirit. But after Russian missiles and drones began raining down on the city, Neselovskyi asked himself whether he could still perform it. The answer: Not only could he, but he had to.
“When I see my hometown being bombed, when I hear my friends living in fear, when I see all this unjust violence that has come to my country, my natural response is the art that I make,” Neselovskyi said. “In that way, it becomes resistance.”
Neselovskyi, now a New York resident and professor at Berklee College of Music, will bring that music to Cambridge on Friday as part of “Voices for Ukraine,” a symposium and concert at First Church in Cambridge gathering Ukrainian artists, mental health professionals, historians and human rights advocates.
The event, running from 4 to 8:30 p.m. at 11 Garden St., is organized by First Aid of the Soul, a U.S.- and Ukraine-registered nonprofit founded shortly after the full-scale invasion began in 2022. The organization trains and mentors Ukrainian mental health professionals, medical workers, teachers and other care providers while supporting locally run programs across Ukraine.
A new initiative on arts and health
Four-and-a-half years into the invasion, founder Nathalie Robelot-Timtchenko said that work has changed considerably.
Early efforts focused on immediate coping strategies, including simple guides teaching parents how to calm children during air-raid sirens. Today, Timtchenko said, providers are confronting the cumulative effects of years of war, including veterans returning to families while the country itself remains under attack.
“There is no real reintegration yet, because this war is still happening,” Timtchenko said.
Friday will also mark the public launch of First Aid of the Soul’s Arts & Health Initiative, which will partner with two Ukrainian hospitals and two universities in the Kyiv area to train artists in trauma-informed practices and help artists and mental health professionals work together in communities affected by the war.
Timtchenko, who studied expressive arts therapy at Lesley University and later earned a master’s degree at the Harvard Kennedy School, said art can provide ways of confronting trauma that conventional conversation sometimes cannot.
“The arts is a way that people can really find a sense of healing, sense of belonging, and connection that the words just often can’t do,” Timtchenko said.
Sustaining an identity
That work also serves another purpose: resisting the erasure of Ukrainian cultural identity.
Timtchenko said the impulse to celebrate Ukrainian identity frequently emerges in artwork produced through the organization’s programs, from the blue and yellow of the country’s flag and sunflowers, a national symbol, to references to participants’ hometowns.
One teenager came from a northern Ukrainian village where, during Russian occupation, roughly 300 residents were forced into a school basement for more than a month. He told Timtchenko he wanted his art to help the West understand that Ukrainians were “not just the war.”
Neselovskyi said he hopes his music can send much the same message.
“Ukrainians are also artists,” he said. “We have culture. We have identity, actually centuries-long identity that deserves to be heard and experienced in the West.”
The symposium will put those questions of psychological and cultural survival alongside questions of legal accountability.
Anastasiya Donets, a Boston-based Ukrainian human rights lawyer and First Aid of the Soul board member, will moderate a panel Friday. Through her work with International Partnership for Human Rights, Donets helps document alleged Russian crimes against humanity. The organization is currently working with Harvard’s International Human Rights Clinic to examine evidence that Russia’s actions in Ukraine are being carried out with genocidal intent.
“These people are subjected to unlawful detention, torture, inhuman conditions of detention, enforced disappearances, killings, everything you can possibly imagine,” Donets said of abuses documented in formerly Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine.
Symposia and concert
Friday’s symposium will also feature speakers including Nobel Peace Prize laureate Oleksandra Matviichuk, Harvard historian Serhii Plokhii and former U.S. Agency for International Development administrator Samantha Power. The symposium will be followed by a reception and silent auction featuring works donated by Ukrainian artists before an evening concert featuring Ukrainian and local performers, including Neselovskyi and Timtchenko, who will perform “Freedom,” a song she began writing during Ukraine’s 2013-2014 Maidan Revolution.
Donets met Timtchenko through Harvard’s Ukraine Caucus while the two were studying at the university and later joined First Aid of the Soul’s board. Donets said she was initially reluctant to seek mental health care after the full-scale invasion began, reflecting a longstanding stigma around therapy in Ukraine. A colleague eventually persuaded her.
“It was one of the best decisions in my life,” Donets said. “There is this stereotype that if you need mental health support, it means you’re failing, that you’re going crazy. … I think since the full-scale invasion, people have become less cautious about this because everybody has experienced some kind of loss, some kind of trauma.”
A stronger
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