The podcast Kitchen Conversations run by Patrycja Rozwora is a platform which allows to hear artists from so-called “Eastern Europe” speak about their work and practices in the context of the current socio-political situation in this region.
After February 24, a lot of artists and creatives were burdened with the question of how to make art in times of war. In response, Patrycja proposes a special edition of her podcast, dedicated to Ukrainian culture and art. A selection of books, films, activists, musicians and so on are recommended to her by her fellow Ukrainian artist friends. The thumbnails of the episodes are protest banners painted by Patrycja and used on various antiwar demonstrations at her current home – Berlin.
Episode 1 was curated by a Ukrainian-American painter and muralist, Tatyana Ostapenko, episode 2 by a Ukrainian visual artist and photographer, Olga Permiakova, and episode 3 by a Ukrainian-Brazilian photographer, Alex Blanco.
Unlike the first two episodes where the recommendations come from all across Ukraine, episode 3 focuses on a specific Ukrainian city. Alex Blanco – Ukrainian-Brazilian photographer and curator of this episode, shares recommendations from her home city Odesa (located at the Black Sea, south of Moldova).
The most recent one, episode 4, was curated by Yuliia Elyas, originally from Dnipro, a Ukrainian artist, researcher and writer, currently based between Utrecht and Amsterdam. On the one hand, Yuliia’s practice can be placed somewhere at the intersection of the academic and the artistic world, and on the other, she is an active contributor and organizer of various community-based initiatives. From the beginning of the War in Ukraine, with the help of other volunteers, she created Help Ukraine Utrecht, an organisation with a physical location in Utrecht providing, among others, humanitarian and psychological aid to Ukrainian people affected by the ongoing attrocities in their homeland.
For the podcast, she recommends two writers and one film, each in a different way addressing the problem of Russian imperialism, and showing its different manifestations across important Ukrainian historical events. The first recommendation is the work of Oksana Zabuzhko – a brilliant novelist, poet, essayist and author of the famous book Fieldwork in Ukrainian Sex. The second one is a writer and journalist, Stanislav Aseyev, the author of In Isolation: Dispatches from Occupied Donbas. The book describes the internal and external changes observed in the cities of Makiïvka and Donetsk since 2014. Lastly, Yuliia recommends to look at Enthusiasm: The Symphony of Donbas – a 1931 sound film directed by a Soviet filmmaker, Dziga Vertov – propagating the life of a Soviet worker and at the same time shedding light onto the history of ‘extracting’ resources and people in this region.
The conversation can be listened to on most of the podcast streaming platforms such as:
