Liubov MorozovaBook Arsenal

Liubov Morozova

Curator of the Music Program

Music expert, music critic, lecturer, TV and radio presenter. Artistic director of the Kyiv Symphony Orchestra. Curator of the music program at the Bouquet Kyiv Stage Festival. Developer and lecturer of a number of courses on new music and the avant-garde of the 1920s in Kyiv and Kharkiv. Author of about a thousand articles on classical and contemporary music for Ukrainian and foreign periodicals.

In 2019, she joined the Book Arsenal team with two curatorial music programs: Imaginary Dances and 40 Years of Hip Hop Music. At the 10th International Book Arsenal Festival, she is curating the Cyclops of Cave Optimism program.

‘The name of this year’s music program is inspired by the longest gypsum cave in the world, which is located in the Ternopil Oblast. Its total length is over 260 km. The cave has an official website and, according to its developers, its own soul. The name ‘Optimistic’ was actually given to it by skeptics, speleologists who did not believe in the success of their work and called the pioneers from Lviv scornfully ‘optimists’. In turn, the Lviv Speleo Club, which discovered the cave and continued its mapping, bears the name Cyclop. If we put all the names together then the somewhat absurd name—Cyclops of Cave Optimism—appears. The program is focused on the extra efforts of the artists who stayed optimistic in the most dreadful times, and the unbearable ease of the gypsum plaster ‘monuments to themselves’ of modern cyclops virtuosos.’