KHERSON
Nova Kakhovka / Mykolaiv / Odesa / Ivano-Frankivsk / Ternopil / Lviv / Kyiv / Kharkiv
Italy / Sweden / Ireland / Moldova / Czech Republic / Canada / Great Britain / Estonia / Spain
ANOTHER
LANDSCAPE
graphics collage textile photography site-specific performance
painting architecture bouquet ceramics embroidery poetry ready-made
Project “Another Landscape” is a platform for our group artistic analysis of our experience after February 24, 2022.
We are the community of artists from Kherson. Artist who, in different times and different formats, were united by Center of cultural development “Totem”.
We are our shared culture and heritage, our collective and personal memories.
We are the bearers of memories, which are not equal to nostalgia.
We are the litmus tests of changes which already happened.
We are eyes, which are trying to see the future through the window of new opportunities.
Another landscape is a shared feeling of "other scenery" outside the window, and other self.
"Another" does not equal "worse".
"Another" does not equal "better".
Another is just different.
Olena Afanasieva
curator
Volodymyr Rainhearth
graphic artist, comic artist
Kherson - Kherson
“The view from my window on the right bank of the Dnipro river hasn’t changed much, but the meaning of what is happening has changed. Just like before, dust clouds can also rise, however now those clouds are made of dust from the explosions of a KAB guided bombs. Earlier, when the columns of smoke rose on the left bank, it meant that the reed beds or forests were burning. Now it means that Russians or their positions are on fire – and you can rejoice. Of course, the forest and buildings are also burning, together with the enemy. Our forest, our reed beds, our buildings. But you are happy anyway, because it is BEAUTIFUL! THE ENEMY IS DYING!”
Mykhailo Klyokta
photographer
Kherson – Kyiv
“When I was lying in almost complete silence in the Kyiv dormitory, I looked at the ceiling and could not fall asleep. I heard someone shuffling upstairs. Heard the rustling of my roommate as he rolled over to the other side. And only when I heard the howling of air-raid sirens, and after a while some explosions, for a moment I was transported home, six hundred kilometers south of the capital and peacefully I fell asleep…”
Inna Mikutska
master embroiderer
Max Afanasyev
designer
Kherson – Odesa
“In the first days of the Russian invasion, the entire emotional message was concentrated in a set of letters available to the enemy. All the resentment and pain shot out with a bullet of a slogan that spread throughout the country in a matter of hours. Never before has the transition from individual memory to collective memory been so impressively fast. Perhaps time, ethics and interaction with the European context will begin to wash out its colors. Perhaps the river of humanism will change the contours of the bank of hatred and the landscape will change... but the terrain will remain”.
Kostyantyn Tereshchenko
graphic artist, painter
Kherson - Sweden
“My mother had a dream. In her dream, she comes to us and goes for a walk with a stroller. The weather is good, she walked around the Gymnazichna street, went to Suvorov Street, to the embankment and came back... She approaches the house and suddenly remembers that we went to Sweden. She is shivering, she looks into the stroller – but it is empty.
...War is like a grandmother carrying an empty baby-carriage into the future.
Liza Yevseeva
architects
Tetiana Yevseeva
architects
Nova Kakhovka - Lviv
“Today, we are once again forced to fight for the cultural heritage of our city - for the occupied heritage. We learned how to conduct a tour of a city without a city and created a master class during which anyone can learn Hryhoriy Dovzhenko's technique – carving on raw clay…”
Anastasia Tereshenko (Chibitseva
performance artist, food florist
Kherson - Switzerland
“I have a lot of questions for the people among who we are living now. I want to know how visible we are, if they notice us. I want to see us with their eyes. I want to know if I’m garbage here, in a foreign land, among people with different upbringing and mentality. I’m learning their language, to be able to ask them.
Andriy Beiko
tattoo artist
Kherson – Ireland
“An hour later the neighbors came and brought two boxes of oil and acrylic paint and watercolors and also a canvas. They found it somewhere, somebody had an artist they knew. So, I gathered many materials I could not even dream of! To express my gratitude, I decided to draw their houses and present them with the paintings”.
Svitlana Mykhaylova-Melnychenko
multidisciplinary artist
Kherson – Kyiv – London
“The largest human protective organ is our skin. Sometimes the skin gets damaged, sometimes it gets frozen, sometimes pimples appear on it, but over time it is able to recover, protecting our muscles and internal organs from adverse conditions and circumstances of the outside. The skin thus can be compared to the earth's crust…”.
Victoria Berezina
artist, graphic designer (collage, digital collage, graphics)
Kherson – Tartu (Estonia)
“When I left the occupation after 7 months, fate brought me to a new city – Tartu, Estonia. On our first night there, we walked the streets, and I tried to understand my feelings. On one hand, it was the freedom I was longing for. The ability to just go outside, to walk without fear of anything, it felt amazing. On the other hand, there was still fear inside of me. The stars in the sky still shine differently for me…”.
Oleksandr Zhukovsky
Artist
Kherson – Kherson
“The war forced everyone to make a choice – to leave or stay in Kherson. I stayed in the city because I could not abandon my four-legged friends. And it is a difficult task to take them out of the city, a shepherd is not a cat, you cannot take it in your arms. Thus, they became my connection with home. Thanks to them, I’m changing internally. Looking at them, I started to appreciate every moment of my life”.
Margarita Bolgar
Artist, painter and graphic
Left bank territory of Kherson region – Mykolaiv – Ivano-Frankivsk – to be continued
“…I am sitting at the palette of spilled multicolored paints, feeling like a pearl inside their stream. Inside my mundane life, I still hold to a more elevated dream. I dream to become a handy “Miss Art-Universe”. The words of Bernard Shaw inspire me: “Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself”.
Oleksandr Semenchenko (Kudikinsky)
Oleksandr Pecherskyi
nature artists
Kherson – Kherson
“Now people who come to us from other regions of Ukraine bring 1-2 bushes of lavender. And we plant them together with the others. This is a lavender infinity. So, we will plant it until it reaches Crimea. We now have our own art space and ceramic workshop also. We bought a kiln for firing ceramics, which was our dream! The first things we made there, were the bull figurines. These are our bulls, Chumak bulls. Going to get sault. To Crimea. Soon…”.
Julia Baluda
artist (graphics, collage, textiles)
Kherson – Florence
“In the year I was born, my grandparents built a small dacha on the banks of the Konka River, a tributary of the Dnipro. For us, that dacha became a place where you could regain peace with yourself. I remember that my grandmother and mother planted many flowers, each of them had their favorites. All my life, this blooming paradise of small dacha inspired me. The explosion of the Kakhovka HPP destroyed the heritage that my relatives were building for us. For me, it’s basically my whole life, which had its roots torn out…”.
Olena Afanasieva
Max
Afanasyev
creative interdisciplinary tandem
Kherson – Ternopil
“Searching for local artifacts and assembling them into bouquets first became our way of exploring and accepting a new environment, and later turned into a full-fledged art therapy. Sometimes it seems that it was not us who discovered it, but it discovered a new us. Because we, as contemporary artists, who are ourselves are all so very contemporary, would never have thought of making bouquets before…”.
Victoria Kontseva
poet, performer
Kherson – Madrid – Lviv
I love Madrid.
Is written on a cup,
which Anna - a Dominican girl - gave to me.
This cup is filled with sorrow.
I could just break it to pieces.
Not take it with me.
Throw it away.
But it became my companion, along my refugee roads.
I placed it next to the cup, which was waiting for me in Ukraine,
which still had coffee in it, dated afternoon February twenty-third.
ANOTHER LANDSCAPE project
The Center of cultural development “Totem”
Funded by the Stabilisation Fund for Culture and Education of the German Federal Foreign Office and the Goethe-Institut.
The Stabilisation Fund 2023 for Culture and Education is a project of the Goethe-Institut and the German Federal Foreign Office to sustainably strengthen the resilience of cultural and educational partners in Ukraine.
