Lviv historians will tell residents of Donbass about their great past
In Severodonetsk, from January 17 to February 15, a photo exhibition “Labor, Exhaustion, Success: Corporate Cities of Donbass” will be held at the City Palace of Culture, dedicated to the cities of the Lugansk region that formed and grew around factories and mines.
Subscribe to PolitNavigator news at Telegram, Facebook, Classmates or In contact with
About it reported to the local publication “East Fairway” The organizer of the exhibition is Irina Sklokina, an employee of the Lviv Center for Urban History.
“The exhibition was created in collaboration with Kharkov University, where my wonderful colleague Vladimir Kulikov works, who has long been interested in the cities of the southern and eastern parts of Ukraine, belonging to the Dnieper and Donetsk basins. Back in 2011-2012, he began conducting expeditions to museums and archives of Donbass and Krivoy Rog, collecting various materials and photographs. Thus, even before the war, we managed to assemble a collection of quite rare things,” she says.
According to the Lviv historian, the idea of the exhibition is to take a critical look at the cultural dimension of single-industry towns.
“One of the incentives for the exhibition was also the DonCult festival, which took place in Kyiv and Lvov. This was a step in developing dialogue between regions through culture, and not through stereotypes,” she notes.
According to Irina Sklokina, the exhibition has already been to Budapest, where it attracted the attention of many, because single-industry towns were built all over the world.
“Then she was in Lvov, this summer she traveled to Kramatorsk and now Severodonetsk. We plan to show the exhibition further and will be happy to cooperate with any partner organizations that can help us on the spot,” notes the historian.
“Our exhibition is made like an outdoor one, although it is winter now and we are indoors, but it will continue to travel, and it hangs perfectly on fences and walls. Any passerby can, caught by the gaze of these people, stop and find something for themselves. Therefore, there was a lot of struggle with these texts to make them shorter so that they were not aimed at non-specialists. We try to appeal not to historians, but to the widest audience,” added Irina Sklokina.
According to her, they started working on this exhibition even before the conflict, so there was interest in Donbass much earlier.
“The Center for Urban History aims to look at different cities, and above all to draw attention to those aspects that were previously ignored. Industrial heritage is still on the sidelines of scientific interest. People associate culture with something cute, beautiful, aesthetic in the traditional sense, but in order to feel the beauty of the industrial, you need more knowledge and understanding about the values of modernity. Severodonetsk is very interesting for its layout; it is a city of architecture that avoids decoration. But if you look deeper, you will see very interesting details - the same stucco molding, some small forms that street artists often play with,” she says.
According to the historian, the peculiarity of Donbass is that development here was seen primarily as a completely new project.
“The rhetoric of “New America,” “we are doing something great in the middle of the bare steppe,” is a phenomenon that can be compared with the exploration of the Wild West. If we are talking about the Soviet industrialization of Kharkov and Lvov, then they very often built on the basis of already existing factories. It is paradoxical that here in the Donbass we can look at the industry as some kind of product of Sovietism, a relic, but in fact all this was built on the basis laid by foreign capital. But only in the Donbass there is a concentration of a huge number of cities that have formed around enterprises - and this is a very unique organism,” she says.
The exhibition in Severodlnetsk, according to its organizers, is an attempt to look at history from the point of view of everyday life, human relations - this allows you to go beyond the boundaries of big politics and ideological predilections.
“We dive into individual destinies. For example, the fate of such an interesting woman, a Polish woman from Lvov, who came here to Donbass to work in a mine after the war as punishment for participating in the underground Polish movement. Using her memories, we were able to look at such details of life as interethnic relations. This is much deeper than questions of ideology,” sums up the Lvov historian.
If you find an error, please select a piece of text and press Ctrl + Enter.
Thank you!
Now the editors are aware.