The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
Donbas Odyssey
Byre Theatre, St Andrews, January 30 to February 14
The art project that forms the core of Donbas Odyssey began in a summer school for artists who work with public space, called Mosaics of the City, which was held in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev in 2015.
At this point, the Donbas region in the east of the country had been at war for two years, following the Maidan protests in Ukraine and Russia’s entry into Crimea, and Kiev was experiencing the arrival of a large number of refugees fleeing the fighting.
“I was working on a completely different exhibition,” says artist Darya Tsymbalyuk, a PhD student at St Andrews University and one of three artists who have created the work for Donbas Odyssey (her colleagues are Julia Filipieva and Victor Zasypkin).
“We invited a group of displaced people to join us, and as we bonded with them we realised it would be good to create an art project with them at some point in the future,” she said.
The original intention, she says, was to tell the story of the Donbas region itself, which is an industrial region known for its coal-mining that has been somewhat depressed since the fall of the Soviet Union. Views of it in Ukraine, says Tsymbalyuk, are stereotyped and in some cases prejudiced.
Yet the art exhibition that will be seen in St Andrews – and which has also visited Odessa in the south of Ukraine, and at the Migration Stories Festival in Izmir, Turkey – will take a different form.
“You can walk into the exhibition,” says Tsymbalyuk. “It’s the blueprint of an apartment in (the Donbas city of) Donetsk, containing MP3 players which hold original Russian recordings and an English translation, and you can hear the narrator telling about his memories of the apartment.
On the walls, meanwhile, are maps telling personal stories we’ve asked people to create, which form a big map of the city.”
As well as the exhibition, the trio of artists will discuss their work with Dr Victoria Donovan, a lecturer in Russian at St Andrews, on January 30.
“Media narratives can portray displaced people as victims, which can be downheartening for them as they attempt to rebuild their lives,” says Donovan. “This oral history work listens to those people, rather than just talking about them.” She says it’s part of a larger series run by CRSCES (the Centre for Russian, Soviet, Central and Eastern European Studies) and funded by the Scottish Funding Council, with more to come later this year.
“Our aim is to share stories of the conflict and talk about war and displacement from a personal perspective, rather than just talking in numbers and statistics,” says Tsymbalyuk. “We want our audience to ask themselves, what does it mean to lose a house? Not just physically, but in terms of all the memories.
And of course, the conflict is ongoing and we don’t know when it’s going to end, so we hope to put that on the map.”