On Oct. 4, as Ukraine and Russia traded lethal drones and missiles, an exhibition of Stefan Sagmeister’s latest work—never shown anywhere before—opened in Lviv.
The message of the exhibition was Now is Better, coinciding with a talk by Sagmeister on Oct. 5 at Dysarium, the largest Ukrainian design conference.
Given the war, there were no flights to the event. But a car was waiting for Sagmeister in neighboring Warsaw. Below is a report of his stay in Lviv.
“Overall, it was absolutely amazing. Four thousand people attended in person and another 4,000 watched it live online, which makes Dysarium one of the largest design conferences in the world.
“Considering how difficult it is currently to get into the country, I have to assume this was a purely Ukrainian audience with few designers traveling in from abroad. Lviv is a gorgeous historic city of a million people, all UNESCO heritage sites, with an effective mayor [who] I met up with three times—he came to the opening, the lecture, and stayed for hours.
“There was intermediate and long-lasting applause during and after the lecture, and all conversations I had during the opening of the exhibit were all extra supportive. I must have heard the sentence, ‘Thank you for coming to Ukraine and bringing this message,’ literally hundreds of times.
“The Ukrainian publisher managed to get a Ukrainian version of our book printed in time for the conference. I signed it for hours.”
“Initially, I was unsure if our core message about long-term thinking and Now is Better would be something that could be appreciated in a country facing such real and significant hardship.
“My anxiety evaporated when it became clear that our positive message landed in the hearts and minds of the people in Lviv—it was actually welcomed much more than among countries and people who live in comparably peaceful and secure situations.
“A friend commented that a future optimistic message resonates more with a society that is experiencing a traumatic event such as a war, possibly similar to the optimism during the first Postwar decades in the U.S. and Western Europe. My Ukrainian friend Andreii thought that if your life is filled with a lot of real trouble, it sharpens the senses for something good: the possibility to sleep through an entire night without having to move to a bomb shelter. Or, in this case, a positive design exhibit.
“On the first day we visited a giant hospital for the wounded in the war, with many buildings, thousands of beds and departments for designing and building prosthesis devices.
“On our last day we were told about a large number of incoming Iranian drones. They asked us to download an app that showed us which districts in Ukraine were affected, and if we needed to temporarily move into a shelter during the night. We checked with the hotel for the nearest shelter. The drones wound up coming close to Lviv but ultimately were all intercepted. We slept through the night.
“The Ukrainian hospitality reached legendary levels, and we truly felt in very good hands.
“We could not have felt more welcome.”
