Trade shows exist to sell products and services, with every exhibitor assigned a category – but where do you put a booth upholding a nation’s soul? At Marmomac in Verona, Italy, this year, a show booth didn’t sell a particular material or machine or any other solution for stone. The small, single stand offered something else: the spirit of the people of Ukraine. To people in the United States, the concept of Ukraine is evolving into a secondary political battleground of democracy-above-all versus not-our-fight wrangling. For those in Ukraine, it’s a very real battlefield, with bombs and bullets and death; for other Europeans, it’s a struggle that’s creating collateral damage in business and everyday life. Here, Ukraine doesn’t make much of an impression on people. In Europe, it’s much different. Porcelain producers had to find alternatives to the clay mined in areas of the Donbas that now serves as the front line of the Ukrainian-Russian conflict. Skyrocketing energy costs, and a looming shortage of Russian-supplied natural gas cause plenty of worry for those material manufacturers looking to heat kilns and drying ovens – as well as everyone seeking to keep their homes warm this winter. Into this atmosphere came a group of artists presenting “Vitality Ukraine,” with an exhibition filling up one trade-show booth at the outer edges of Marmomac’s exhibit halls. (I would’ve missed it, except for the guidance of Peter Becker, editor at stone-ideas.com. Thanks, Peter) The small exhibit, as noted by the Ukrainian artists, showed viewers “the ability to continue and live and develop whatever may happen around us, just as Ukraine is showing the whole world now.” The stone items, according to the artists are transformed “in a sort of garden of rebirth and life – a vitality to overcome these moments of anxiety.” The items shown below represent those Ukrainian ideals, from the marking of time of the country’s freedom, to rebirth, unity, fertility of land and other symbols.