“I have always felt that there is hatred toward men inside me. At first, I ran from this thought. Then I thought it was hatred toward my father. Later, I started to see my mother’s hatred toward her father and toward my father. These fathers even looked alike. Then I looked at this hatred for a long time. And it did not go away. At some point, I began to see it going far back, starting somewhere long before I was born. This hatred is like a guiding thread in the dark, something to hold on to. It turns out that hatred can be a support. I see how it is a support for many women. It was a support for me too.”

In recent years, Maryna has explored a fundamental question: where does ecology truly begin? Not with soil or water, not with recycling systems or politics, but with how the human mind relates to living systems.

Eco-mind feminism is her approach to viewing human consciousness as the first level of ecological relationships. While classical ecofeminism links feminist and ecological critique, eco-mind feminism shifts the focus inward, toward the ecology of consciousness. It investigates how inner mental processes, patriarchal modes of thinking, and inherited trauma shape behavior, social institutions, and our interactions with the environment.

This approach is inseparable from Semenkova’s artistic practice. In The Vyshyvanka (Arles, 2022), the female body becomes simultaneously a landscape of inherited memory and a site of resistance to patriarchal conditioning. In TAPED (Paris, 2024), the body is physically constrained, yet these constraints transform into acts of liberation, through engagement with materials and embodied presence. These works trace how violence embedded in collective memory can be transmuted into movement, presence, and ecological sensitivity.

Eco-mind feminism demonstrates that working with the inner ecology of consciousness—understanding trauma, cultivating empathy, and engaging in critical reflection—is not merely psychological but also profoundly social and ecological. In RED UTOPIA (Munich, 2022), the repeated act of knitting a red flag becomes a meditative ritual: repetition replaces production, and care replaces domination. Personal effort transforms into collective meaning, the movement of hands becomes an architecture of trust, and labor becomes a gesture of co-creation.

Within this framework, the ecology of consciousness represents a primary level of interaction between mind, social structures, and environment. What remains unconscious manifests in politics, economics, and institutional structures, as well as in the treatment of nature—perpetuating cycles of violence and exploitation. Patriarchal cognition supports this system through binary logic (“above—below,” “rational—emotional,” “male—female”), a compulsion to control living systems, and the exclusion of empathy from what is deemed rational.

In PARAGRAPH24 (Berlin, 2023), Semenkova engages directly with these structures through bureaucracy. Administrative documents from her first months in exile were transformed into material objects—soaked, shredded, and shaped into papier-mâché forms. The interplay of body and paper made visible the intimate, material, and symbolic dimensions of migration, grief, and bureaucratic identity. The performance became both an artistic gesture and a practice of mental ecology, a means of processing and reworking experience.

In Eulogy (2025, Heidelberg), this process assumes a ritualized form. Grief is transformed into a collective act of witnessing and healing. Here, the “ecology of consciousness” emerges as the capacity to remain present with suffering without perpetuating cycles of violence.

From this perspective, working with the inner ecology of consciousness is not merely a private psychological exercise but a social, political, and ecological act. Eco-mind feminism challenges binary models that underpin power, knowledge, and language. It does not seek to dismantle systems but to transform them from within—through attention, empathy, embodied awareness, and the capacity to revise beliefs.

In the long-term project INSIDE (2025–ongoing, Ukraine / Germany), these principles unfold across space and generations. The body becomes a medium of memory, and space a vessel for inherited trauma, resonating through time and lineage. The project is both performance and installation, returning to the roots of trauma where personal, historical, and environmental narratives intersect. It cultivates a new mode of perception—ecological, empathic, and nonlinear—where consciousness is inseparable from the living world.

Eco-mind feminism posits that the quality of human thought directly shapes social institutions and ecosystem health. Patriarchy is understood not only as a social hierarchy but as a cognitive system based on separation, control, and domination. Liberation begins with the emergence of a new sensitivity—the capacity to be with the world, rather than above it.

How is eco-mind feminism different from the classic ecofeminism that appeared in the 1970s–80s

Ecofeminism brings together ecological and feminist critique.
It says that the oppression of women and the destruction of nature have the same roots — a patriarchal system of power based on domination, control, and hierarchy.
The main focus of ecofeminism is social, political, and symbolic: to show how the exploitation of nature and women’s bodies is built into capitalist and patriarchal culture.

Eco-Mind Feminism is a next step — a more inner and integrative development of ecofeminism.
It does not only analyze external structures of power but also explores how patriarchal models exist inside the human mind — in ways of thinking, perception, and relation to the body and the environment.

If ecofeminism says:

“We must change the system,”
then eco-mind feminism adds:
“We must change the way of thinking that creates this system.”

So, eco-mind feminism connects the ecology of mind, psychotherapeutic thinking, and feminist philosophy.
It says that ecological and social crises cannot be solved without rethinking the inner structure of human perception — without transforming the cognitive and emotional patterns that support a culture of domination.

Why Society Needs Eco-Mind Feminism Today

The global crises we face today — ecological, social, and psychological — show that external reforms are not enough.
Our world suffers not only from destructive systems, but from the way of thinking that created them.
Eco-Mind Feminism responds to this crisis by proposing a transformation of consciousness itself.

It connects ecology, feminism, and psychology, showing that domination over women and nature is rooted in the same mental patterns: control, separation, and denial of interdependence.
To heal the planet, we must also heal the mind that sees the world as an object to be used.

Eco-Mind Feminism calls for:

• Integrative awareness — understanding that inner and outer ecosystems are part of one whole.
• Empathic leadership — valuing care, listening, and emotional intelligence in social and political life.
• New ethics of responsibility — replacing control with dialogue, and domination with cooperation.
• Education of consciousness — developing reflective and emotional literacy as a part of cultural progress.

Without this inner transformation, no ecological or social solution can be sustainable.
Eco-Mind Feminism invites society to evolve — from the culture of control to the culture of care, from separation to connection.

This text is still in a draft stage, but the artist has been researching this topic for many years and is now planning to develop it on an academic level within a PhD program.