Photo courtesy of Donbas Family Photo Archive
Plus/Minus Art Residency
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December 24, 2018
The visual anthropology project Donbas Family Photo Archive was presented on November 29 at the IZOLYATSIA Platform for Cultural Initiatives. Kateryna Siryk, curator of the Plus/Minus Art Residency in Severodonetsk, and Vadim F. Lurie, an independent researcher, anthropologist, and photographer from Petersburg, presented the project.
The expedition kicked off in February 2018 in three neighboring cities in Luhansk Region: Severodonetsk, Lysychansk, and Rubizhne. The aim was to find and digitize the family photo archives of local residents and compile a database.
“Family life (private life) and public life are bound up in photo archives. The boundary between them is not always visible, a consequence of the ideological structure of society and life in the twentieth century. These things helped us record and analyze culture, history, and the socio-political aspects of life in Luhansk Region,” said Lurie.
According to Lurie, the memory and post-memory of Donbas are not simply timely subjects. They are also painful subjects for many people in Ukraine and Russia.
“The issue of this region’s memory has been politicized. It has been overrun by speculations and rebuttals of these speculations. These are not merely different opinions. They are one of the ideological grounds of the conflict of Eastern Ukraine. The family archives of Donbas residents can lead us to an objective understanding of the people who have lived here,” Lurie argued.
The project’s plans for 2019 include a series of exhibitions and discussions in the cities involved in the project and elsewhere in Ukraine, museumification of the photo archive, and creation of an online database.
Prior to Kyiv, the project had been presented at the seminar War, Photo Archives and the Temporalities of Cultural Heritage, at the Max Planck Institute’s Art History Institute in Florence, the seminar Urban Landscapes of Memory: Conflicts and Transformations, at CISR Berlin, and a press conference at the Seversky Donets Crisis Media Center.
Donbas Family Photo Archive: http://donbasphotoarchive.tilda.ws/ru
Contacts: donbasphotoarchive@plusminus.org.ua, (099) 944-6803
Translated by the Russian Reader
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