After the conversation, Vera Logdanidi does what she is known for: she puts on techno music.

Her body rocks slightly back and forth, she grins, then she turns the knobs on the mixer and a deep, powerful bass sounds.

The people in front of her in the foyer of the Frankfurt Museum Of Modern Electronic Music, MOMEM for short, start dancing.

Excessive parties where you forget everyday life: That's what Logdanidi stands for.

Alexander Juergs

Editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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The music producer and label owner is an important head of the Kiev techno and house scene.

She is part of the music label Rhythm Büro, she hosted a radio show called "Kashtan" in which she was able to offer a forum to young, as yet unknown Ukrainian artists.

And she organizes the Natura festival in a forest near Kyiv, where thousands gather to celebrate and dance.

Places of longing for the ravers of Europe

The scene that shaped Logdanidi for many years was until recently considered the most exciting in Europe.

Nowhere are celebrations wilder, more excessive, freer and more creative than in Kyiv, they say.

The clubs of the Ukrainian capital were places of longing for ravers from many parts of Europe, free spaces for the queer scene.

Then the war came and everything was different.

How she experienced the outbreak of war, how the music makers from the Ukrainian capital spread across Europe shortly afterwards, and what she has been doing since then, Logdanidi talks about on Thursday evening in the Frankfurt Techno Museum with Katrin Kimpel, multimedia editor at Hessischer Rundfunk.

The evening is the start of a new series under the motto "Global Movements" in the museum, which opened in April at the Hauptwache.

Producers, DJs and party organizers from different corners of the world will report on their work and the scene in their home countries.

The dream of home

Like millions of others, Logdanidi fled the Russian war of aggression.

She set off, first to Lemberg in western Ukraine, together with her mother, her sister, her child and her husband, who is also an artist in the electronics scene.

They traveled west from Kyiv in a darkened train far from the usual routes, concerned that the train might come under fire, Logdanidi recalled in MOMEM.

Later she moved to Budapest.

From there she is now trying to continue working in her profession.

In the past few months she has hung up in Bialystok in Poland, in Porto and in Portugal's capital Lisbon, in Berlin and Bremen.

In between she was also back in Kyiv.

Logdanidi wanted to know what happened to her apartment, her studio full of equipment and her record collection.

"I really want to go home, we all love Kyiv, it's our city," she says.

She perceived her home country as having changed enormously.

“Today Kyiv is a city without children,” she says.

"Our children now live in Poland, in Germany and elsewhere in the world."

Despite the war, do not lose hope

Can you dance in war?

Are you allowed to celebrate when there is fighting at the front?

The artist says that there is now a lot of discussion about this in the club scene in Kyiv.

Most, she says, now believe it's legitimate.

That it is important to hide the terrible for a few moments to gather strength.

But there is another reason for Logdanidi: "We have to preserve the spirit that characterizes Kyiv and its club culture," says the techno musician.

She says that a few weeks ago a new record shop opened in the city, in a closed liquor factory - and that this is an important sign for the scene.

The record dealers donate part of their earnings to Ukrainian soldiers.

Logdanidi and her colleagues from Rhythm Büro are already planning the next edition of the "Natura" festival.

The festival has been announced for August 2023. The Kiev club organizers don't want to give up hope.