Scattered Communities: news from the second round

In April, we started working with the participants of the second round of the Scattered Communities program, which we created together with the Asortymentna Kimnata to maintain or reconfigure connections in the Ukrainian art community, both in Ukraine and abroad. We organize online meetings and discussions focusing on sensitive/uncomfortable/silenced topics, support new artistic tandems and joint projects.

In this circle, we have managed to support projects, work-in-progress, mobilities, and artist flows. Among them:

• Victoria Lykholot and Maria Petrenko, artists based in Berlin, will create a guide to the places to which their routine in migration is tied. In their work, they will use various media: photos, videos, texts, and contour maps.
• The “Montage Group,” consisting of Katya Libkind, Yegor Antsygin, and Kateryna Lesiv, will focus on the idea of compensatory action. The trio, scattered between different countries (Ukraine, Austria, Finland), works with common feelings of responsibility, instability, and uncertainty, and the possibility of balancing them through different artistic and/or everyday practices.
• Vitalii Matukhno (Kyiv) and Katerina Lischynska (Leipzig) will focus on the inequality of their own experiences in terms of war, migration, freedom, and distance. They will record their observations in the form of free storytelling and present them in the form of a self-published book.
• Mykola Lebed and Mykhailo Tomilin, artists based in Berlin and Vienna, will work on the documentary animation film The Connection.
• The family tandem of Pavlo and Danylo Kovach (Donetsk region – Vienna) will explore the intersections between war and everyday life, as well as the documentation of artifacts as evidence of trauma. They will use the photo and video documentation created by Pavlo during his military service and the motifs of shoe wiping mats that Danylo has been working with in recent years (and which he connects to the themes of emigration, hospitality, and the act of cleansing before entering the space of the home).
• Harry Kraevets (Germany), Teta Tsybulnyk (USA), and Pavlo Kerestey (UK) will conduct “psychotherapeutic walks” or impossible encounters. Tied to the concept of Antarctica as a common land, they will start simultaneously in Germany, Ukraine, and the UK. The walks will combine the practice of reading aloud, performative actions, exploration of spaces and non-urban environments, as well as elements of group psychotherapeutic processes.
• The artists Valeria Zubatenko and Kateryna Motyliova, who live in Brussels and The Hague, are creating the “ENCYCLOPEDIA OF CATASTROPHY | at the Museum of Apocalypse”. It is a series of experimental photographs and texts focused on human interaction with the material world in a state of catastrophe, as well as the consequences of techno-industrial civilization. They chose the Ukrainian city of Zaporizhzhia as the field of research.
• Volodymyr Prylutskyi (Kyiv), Pavlo Yurov (front line), and Anna Ivchenko (Berlin) are investigating the processes of long-term communication through the practice of correspondence. They intend to reveal “Ukrainian multiverses”, the (in)accessible spaces of Ukrainians’ experiences in emigration, at the home front, and at the front.
• Vitaliy Ruppelt and Mykola Lebed will work on a joint album through the exchange of field recordings. Both artists work with sound, grew up in Rivne, but now find themselves in radically different conditions. One is in the military, the other is in exile.

The program will also include four trips to Ukraine and abroad to exchange ideas and explore the context of the artists’ lives and work. In addition, three artist talks are planned – follow the announcements on social media.

The “Scattered Communities” program is implemented by Asortymentna Kimnata and Insha Osvita with the support of the Robert Bosch Stiftung.