Toronto

Niagara Falls – crossing the border from the U.S.A. to Canada by train.
 

From 9–15 August I was in Toronto for a week of in-depth archival research at HREC and UCRDC. The project “Animated Testimonies from Ukraine in the Holodomor” is part-funded by a Research Grant from HREC, the Holodomor Research and Education Consortium. The idea to visit Toronto was from Marta Baziuk, Executive Director of HREC. I worked with the archives and collections from HREC Special Collections and the Ukrainian Canadian Research & Documentation Centre. This includes survivors’ stories and materials collected for Harvest of Despair, the first feature film about the Holodomor, produced by UCRDC. This was a fantastic week including meeting Roman Waschuk, Iroida Wynnyckyj, the team at UCRDC and a fantastic insight into the collections from Bozhena Gembatiuk. I met and worked with Karolina Koziura, from the Munk School at the University of Toronto and met and spoke to Michael Cherkas, author of Red Harvest. I spent one day at the Petro Jacyk Central and East European Resource Centre at the University of Toronto where I met Ksenya Kiebuzinski who, as well as an introduction to the collections also introduced me to Substack posts which I have been reading avidly from Paul Krugman and Heather Cox Richardson. Both a fantastic overview and insight into American economics and history in a contemporary context. At PJRC I viewed material from the Maps Collections, animations directed by Volodymyr Honcharov and Natalia Marchenkova, a short from the diaries of Oleksandr Dovzhenko directed by Andrii Donchyk (1988) and read work from Anna Shternshis and Oksana Kis.

I managed to fit in a short trip to Niagara Falls, a visit to Casa Loma, a trip to Kensington Market and an evening of bliss in Robarts Library. This was one of the most fantastic weeks of my academic career and thank you to Marta, the teams at HREC and UCRDC and everybody else who I met and spent time with in Toronto, some of whom I haven’t mentioned here. Thank you.

Archival materials at UCRDC on video tape. 

Archival materials at UCRDC on film.

Double page spread from Red Harvest by Michael Cherkas.

The Ukrainian and Russian Notebooks: Life and Death under Soviet Rule. Graphic novel by Igort.
 

Coffee break in downtown Toronto.

Archival materials at UCRDC – Holodomor Survivors.

In the Shadow of Stalin, graphic novel about Mr. Jones based on the film. By Andrea Chalupa and Ivan Rodrigues.

Viewing station at Robarts Library, University of Toronto with collections from PJRC.
 

UCRDC work in progress.

Bozhena Gembatiuk, me, and Roman Waschuk (seated).

Important and missing ideas from Marta Baziuk and Yana Khalik.

“Niagara”. Film with Marilyn Monroe, 1953, return train to New York viewing.

Research Meeting: Professor Lisa Stansbie Monday 10 August

Leadership, travelling, archival work, coding, objects, relationships of objects, system of approach, rule-based approach, animals, black raven, life and death, testimonies, pencil drawings, disintegration, hands, gestures, drawing interviewees, Kazakhstan, Vietnam, aprute [unreadable], website (publishing) audio recording, community members, music, space for seeing what happens, secret service files, finger prints, animation timings, pencil drawings, structure and vision, short film, meetings.

Donauinsel – The Danube Island

I spent time in Vienna in July on my way to the RUTA Association conference in Uzhhorod. The images below are from Donauinsel, The Danube Island. I shot all on Kodak UltraMax 400, fast becoming my favourite 35mm film. Donauinsel, The Danube Island is an artificial island built as a flood protection project between 1972 and 1988. The island splits the river in two. The Danube flows to the south, the New Danube (Neue Donau) runs north of the natural river. I walked along the north side of the island, the photos below show the Neue Donau. The images relate to rural landscapes, street drawings I created in Ukraine which I will write about in a separate post.

Wien Museum. “The danube Island: 13 Miles of Freedon.” Accessed August 1, 2026, at https://www.wienmuseum.at/donauinsel_2026_en.

Вибачте Номерів Немає

Я відвідала студійну екскурсію арт-проекту «Sorry No Rooms Available». Я познайомилася з художником Петром Ряском. Петро почав працювати з художниками в готелі «Інтурист-Закарпаття» у 2016 році. У рамках проєкту проводяться резиденції та проекти художників. Мені дуже сподобалася ця робота Patrycja Plich 2018 року. Вірші та текст зʼявляються на світильниках на 4-му поверсі готелю.

 

Петро відремонтував готельні номери, щоб створити простори для життя та роботи художників. Петро показав мені три кімнати з оригінальними меблями та робочим освітленням. Внизу є ресторан та арт-простір. Більше інформації онлайн: https://sorrynoroomsavailable.tumblr.com/ та в Instagram https://www.instagram.com/sorrynoroomsavailable/. Арт-простір – це оранжерея, а в ресторані є місце для виставок.

The City / Misto. 1928.

 

The City is a Ukrainian novel by Valerian Pidmohylnyi, 1928. This edition is translated with an introduction by Maxim Tarnawsky, 2025. Set in Kyiv, the main character is a student who has arrived from his village. The book opens with an unexpected horizon. The main character, Stepan, looking into the distance. As Stepan finds his way through his world the author gives a glorious account of the city in the 1920s.

The existential parts of the text reminded me of my student reading. The connection between Pidmohylnyi and his main character includes Pidmohylnyi’s work in Kyiv and arrival from a village. The city and the village are a central theme of the novel.

Other city literature includes Christopher Isherwood’s novels about Berlin in the 1930s. Isherwood saw his role as a camera-like observer. His biography is written in the third person and deliberately objective. There are also connections to The Outsider by Camus. One of my favourite descriptions of Camus’ work is by Christopher Bollas who describes the detachment of the main character from his emotions and the link the author makes to time in the novel. In a brilliant description of the main character observing the street around him, Bollas describes the pace of the novel and the relationship between time and space in the book. According to Bollas, the connection to Baudelaire’s ideas about city life is important to analyse The Outsider (The Stranger) because Camus’ work adds an important dimension: “he splits the viewer’s self in two: an alive observer, a dead self. The prose is animated but Meursault is not; just as he is removed from the people he sees, he is a “stranger” to the very prose that describes him” (Bollas, 2018, p. 28). I am collecting ideas about observation and witnessing for a roundtable I have been invited to present at next week. I am exploring witnessing, in relation to testimonies from the Holodomor and to the Full-Scale Invasion by Russia in Ukraine.

Bollas, C. (2018) Meaning and Melancholia: Life in the Age of Bewilderment. Routledge.
Isherwood, C. (2012) Christopher and His Kind. Vintage.
Pidmohylnyi, V. (2025) The City. Translated with an introduction by M. Tarnawsky. Harvard University Press.

Research meeting: Professor Lisa Stansbie

 

Toronto, archives, cataloguing, data themes, words and expressions, uses of language, preparation, film production, reading lists, digital archives, language and machine learning, models, transcription, text mining, Berman, bridges, Ukraine, interactive digital film space, gallery, performance, public and private, split screen work, instructions, website, community involvement, dissemination, distribution, visual style, narrative production, website, publicity, Rozpad, postcards, inquiry testimonies, audio tapes, uncatalogued archives, visuals, animation, sources, digitisation of tapes, machine collection, what technology to take, Torgsin, bread lines, fields, bread cards, fingertips, bridges, Berman’s bridge, project completion, time, animation, slow, preparation, schedules, changes in memory over time, stories, research, oral testimony, oral histories, Portelli, Thompson, online learning, HREC course, production, pauses, Alexievich, documenting pauses, how people use their voice. Students.

Rozpad symbolism

Rozpad discussion at HOME. From left to right: Professor Olya Onuch, Dr Sara Nesteruk, Mrs Olia Fedechko. Photography: Stefan Okopskyj.

The notes below are from the post-screening discussion of Rozpad at HOME on Wednesday 17 June.

Rozpad (1990) is full of symbolism. To relate to my own work on the Holodomor, one early narrative focuses on soil. The main character returns from a holiday in Greece and forgets to bring back with him some soil from his father’s ancestral homeland. Instead he goes to a nearby building yard and lies to his father about the origin of the earth. Soil and earth are important symbols in Ukrainian culture. In part because of the Holodomor, the attachment and potency of the land, the earth and the fertility and history of farming. Chornozem (black soil) which is strong, fertile land represents a lot in Ukrainian history and culture. In this particular situation the physical soil represents a deceit which runs through the entirety of the film. The main character lies to his father. It is a small lie about something very significant and meaningful. The main character in turn is being lied to by his partner who is almost casually having an affair with a school friend. These intimate deceits exist throughout the whole social network in the film. Nameless government officials minimise the impact of the Chornobyl nuclear power plant accident. At points officials deny completely anything happened. This, as we know now is true to the reality of the Communist government response after the accident at the nuclear power plant.

Deceit and deception highlight the role of arts and culture. Why art is important, even critical throughout history in Ukraine and other places. Art, culture, poetry, literature, film, visual arts and culture can make visible stories and meanings which otherwise can be lost to time. The invisible stories or narratives that have been hidden, oppressed or obscured from view can feature in a physical, tangible articulation within arts and culture.

Rozpad opens with the main character on a train, sharing a small carriage with an older man. Reflecting the decay or disintegration of the film, this older man is physically decaying. His teeth are in a glass in the carriage. The train abruptly comes to a stop because there is no more track. In literature and film the train is one of the great symbols of modernism. Representative of future, progress, technology, driving change, Rozpad takes the metaphor and brings modernism to a halt. Nuclear power is part of the modernist narrative. The great future connected to the Soviet experiment and other visual metaphors in the film. There are some glorious shots of modernist architecture in Prypyat shown from aerial view which have been abandoned. It is possible to argue the film represents a turning point. The end of the modernist ideal and the halt of the train at the start of the film represents the end of modernity in a broader social context.

Later in the film two young lovers who are about to get married disappear into the forest around Prypyat. The forests then and now have become symbols of the nuclear accident and are important in the region. One of the great Ukrainian poets and authors Lesia Ukrainka wrote The Forest Song which reflects the importance of the forest as a metaphor. In Rozpad the forest is a location for the characters’ innocence, naivety and love. Almost biblical. The two main characters disappear into the forest to be alone with each other. There are points where the shots are almost identical to shots in Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, a classic Ukrainian film. In Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors the two main characters play in the forest as children. After the female dies the main character, Ivan, calls to his lover in a scene that is almost identical in Rozpad where the man shouts to his lover through the trees. The difference here, in Rozpad, is the forest, rather than a symbol of nature, all that is natural and naivety, is toxic. The animals are dead. In the background people wearing hazmat suits are putting up radioactive signs. A reference to previous Ukrainian film highlights the toxicity and invisible decay and danger in the natural environment.



The event was fantastic. A really brilliant discussion with Professor Olya Onuch, one of the founders of BASU and on the executive committee and Professor of Comparative and Ukrainian Politics at the University of Manchester. The discussion was with myself and Olia Fedechko from the Organisation of Ukrainian Women in Manchester who spoke about Ukrainian communities in Manchester and the British responses to Chornobyl after the accident. A huge thank you to everybody involved in making the screening a success. To the team at HOME, the funders – ENGAGE, Stefan for photography, the Dovzhenko Film Studios and Centre, Vera from Sunflower Manchester, BASU and all of the individuals who contributed to marketing, publicity, assistance and support on the day. I would love to do more of these screenings.