School of Death

School of Death is an Insha Osvita program dedicated to exploring the culture of mourning and immersing ourselves in it through collective musical and theatrical practices, performance, and participation. We are creating this school for ourselves — for the living ones who want to live — because a calm and honest memory of death and the deceased helps us live this life calmly and honestly.

Death in Ukraine today is simultaneously omnipresent and suppressed — while we have become more vocal about loss, we remain silent about death itself. It is present in our collective experience every day, yet it lacks a language, tools for reflection, and practices that allow us to process grief, to remember without post-soviet, post-colonial, patriarchal, or esoteric layers, and to acknowledge our own finitude.

It is an attempt to work with this void systematically as a cultural field: through rituals, law, embodiment, memory, and collaborative performative practices. For Insha Osvita, this work is linked to our competency model, specifically the “competency to begin and to end things” as an ability to acknowledge finitude, to summarize and pay tribute, as a responsibly let go and move forward. Perhaps our social amnesia is not so much a problem of collective remembering, but a problem of ecological collective forgetting.

The School of Death program consists of:

• Death Cafe – a space for moderated conversations about death, loss, and the personal experience of mourning. The format is based on the global Death Cafe franchise — a social, non-profit, and non-therapeutic practice of open conversation about death. The goal is to increase awareness of death as a part of life, helping everyone better navigate their finitude and more fully value the present. Within our project, Death Cafe is a shared space for conversation that opens the possibility of entering a discussion about death attentively rather than avoiding it.

Since the summer of 2023, this format has been implemented by Alona Karavai through a series of self-organized meetings at Insha Osvita and Asortymentna Kimnata.

• “Last Will” – workshops on drafting wills and legally securing one’s wishes regarding burial and correct practices of remembrance.

Launching in pilot mode in February 2025. This format is inspired by internal team discussions, the solo-exhibition of the instruction letter by artist and poet Klementyna Kvindt (“Remember me as a soldier, a poet, a queer person”), and a will-writing workshop at the “Kruchi” gallery.

• Public program of ethnographic research on mourning practices – a series of meetings, readings, and conversations dedicated to studying traditions of experiencing loss in various communities. The focus is on the Hutsul tradition of “hrushka,” as well as the experiences of Crimean Tatar and Jewish cultures. The program involves researchers, folklorists, historians, and tradition-bearers to discuss which elements of these practices can be reimagined and actualized today.

Currently in development; launching in pilot mode in spring 2026, including both workshops and exhibitions at Asortymentna Kimnata.

• Performing Memory – a series of workshops with performers dedicated to experiencing loss through the body and movement. The program treats mourning as a physical experience that may defy verbalization but manifests in gesture, rhythm, tension, and repetition.

Launching in pilot mode in spring 2026, partly in collaboration with the Antonin Artaud Fellowship.

• Imaginary Monuments – a series of events using participatory commemoration formats, shifting the focus from monumental objects to practices: memory walks, collective actions, temporary gestures of tribute, and musical/dance practices. The project explores how the concept of a “monument” changes in post-Soviet and wartime contexts.

Launching in pilot mode in autumn 2025. One of the first events was a participatory project by Yevheniia Melkonian at Zamkova Hora in November 2025.

• Festival of Death – a series of events on November 1, 2026 (and subsequent years), dedicated to All Souls’ Day.

School of Death is being launched as a self-organized initiative by Insha Osvita, the Antonin Artaud Fellowship, and Asortymentna Kimnata which does not have one supporting organisation or donor yet. We are currently piloting formats and looking for partners, supporters, donators, and like-minded individuals. If this resonates with you or if you are open to institutional cooperation, please reach out us via the link.

Certain formats of the School of Death are implemented with the support of Reveil — an initiative striving to reimagine contemporary European mourning culture, particularly within the “Imaginary Monuments” line.