Who Keeps the Memory
The Background
Ukrainian history over the past three to four generations reveals the fragmented mechanisms of memory preservation in families. Events such as Soviet collectivisation, political, economic, and ethnic repressions, the Holodomor, the Second World War, and the ongoing Russian invasion have significantly disrupted family histories. Similar to the past, people are forced to relocate, leaving behind their roots and taking only essential items – those light yet heavy objects imbued with emotion or purpose. These items tell stories from our past, from our parents’ past, and from our (great-)grandparents’ past. It is fortunate when memorable artefacts are preserved, but what about those lost? Where is their memory kept? Some of it resides in our recollections, actions, and attentiveness, and in our relatives. Who in our families keeps these memories alive? Ultimately, how can we become carriers of family memory?
The art and community-oriented programme Who Keeps the Memory aimed to explore the theme of family memory, its preservation, and ways of passing it down through generations. Through participatory artistic and non-artistic activities, participants were encouraged to delve into their own family histories, share, and preserve them.
Over three weeks, we listened to ourselves and each other, immersing ourselves in the topic of family memory. We discovered methods for sharing family stories, experimented with new ones, and documented our experiences, filling the space with our “work in progress”.
Pidzamche Community
At the Jam Factory, fostering good neighbourly relations and participatory practices remain key aspects of our work. This year’s residency continued as a platform for dialogue with residents of Pidzamche, including newcomers. The programme explored the role of art during wartime and inclusive approaches in art and community-focused projects. Participants of the Who Keeps the Memory programme, recruited through an open call, are residents of the Pidzamche district, which is currently undergoing rapid revitalisation. Due to the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, many families have relocated to Lviv, altering the population dynamics. Despite the war, the newly opened contemporary art centre Jam Factory is becoming a hub for those interested in theatre, visual arts, music, and collaborative projects.
Residents
Asia Tsisar is a Ukrainian curator, writer, and researcher with a focus on Central and Eastern Europe. She holds a degree in Cultural Studies from Kharkiv State Academy of Culture (Ukraine) and East European Studies from Warsaw University (Poland). Her practice sits at the crossroads of art, cultural studies, and political history. In her work, she employs methods of artistic research and creative storytelling, engaging with archives, memory, and narrative analysis. Since 2014, she has overseen visual art projects addressing sensitive historical and memory-related issues in local communities across Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, and Germany.
From 2020 to 2022, she collaborated with the Katarzyna Kozyra Foundation, curating the Secondary Archive project, a platform showcasing female artists from Central and Eastern Europe. Since 2022, Asia has been involved in a nomadic art study titled Children of Summer, during which she adopted a nomadic lifestyle, travelling through the peripheries of Eastern Europe. Her aim has been to gather local perspectives and explore complex regional identities, seeking out stories that reveal unexpected cultural connections. Currently, she resides in Ukraine and is working on a collection of essays based on her travels.
Olha Marusyn is an artist originally from the village of Lanchyn in the Ivano-Frankivsk region and has lived in Lviv since the age of six. Her interdisciplinary practice merges choreography, performance, video, and text-based work. The primary medium she uses is her own body, which often interacts with and extends into the environment. Marusyn was a member of the performative group Abstract Finger (not pointing at anything) and co-founded the Soma Workshop initiative. Through exploring her body and habitual movements, as well as re-evaluating them, she seeks to understand the era she lives in and addresses themes related to both the past and future. During the full-scale war, she began developing the project Exercises Around the Void, sharing its materials and expanding it collaboratively with the residency participants and the wider community.
Liubomyr Tymkiv, born in Lviv in 1975, is an artist, poet, and researcher of Ukrainian ancient sacred art. He graduated from the Lviv College of Decorative and Applied Arts, specialising in artistic wood processing, and later from the Lviv Academy of Arts, where he studied restoration. He also completed postgraduate studies in art history. Liubomyr is a veteran of russian war in Ukraine. His artistic practice operates beyond traditional institutions and physical spaces, often taking place online through quirky blogs, virtual exhibitions, and ongoing correspondence with artists and non-artists worldwide. Each visual message is subtly modified by his delicate interventions using drawings, inscriptions, or collages.
These online activities are complemented by his unique “garage galleries” at his home on the outskirts of Lviv. In this suburban setting, Tymkiv occasionally showcases postcards, graphics, and “zines” from international collaborators, and films content for his virtual projects. During the Who Keeps The Memory programme, he explored the theme of cherished memories with the participants by creating collages, postcards, and self-made books using family photos, stickers, and stamps.
Program and Process
The Research
The artists’ introduction to the residency theme and each other began online in May. By June, they visited Lviv for a week of research with the Jam Factory team, focusing on memory and family archives. This immersive week featured meetings and workshops with experts, fostering deep engagement with the topic and each other’s artistic practices. Highlights included visits to Soma Workshop, co-founded by Olha Marusyn, and the Museum of Mail Art along with Timutopiapress Gallery, founded by Liubomyr Tymkiv. These experiences offered new perspectives on the residents’ artistic approaches.
The Center for Urban History team shared their expertise on memory work, discussing private collections, amateur cinema, and home photo albums. The City Museum presented its approaches to participatory practices and public space engagement, while the Museum of Terror introduced their work on creating museum expositions around tragic events and displacements. They also shared insights from their research on the recently discovered Rosenthal family archive and the #nepochuti project.
Artist Lia Dostlieva conducted a workshop on engaging with other people’s family photo archives, presenting her and Andrii Dostliev’s practices related to the residency theme. Additionally, the group visited Olha Stavnykovych’s studio for neurodiverse artists, exploring collaboration possibilities with the artists and their guardians.
For the first time, City Museum coordinator, art critic, and curator Svitlana Tymkiv was invited for expert consultation on the residency’s art and community-oriented aspects.
Activities with the Community
The community engagement program spanned three weeks, with regular meetings co-developed with the residents. While the overarching “Who Keeps The Memory” structure was collaboratively designed, the process evolved to include distinct multidisciplinary sessions led by each artist.
The community meetings began with Asia Tsisar’s workshop “Mapping Your Home”, an exercise in tracing personal and family histories on maps. Using printed maps and coloured markers, participants explored their family history through geography, discovering a familial sense of place. Subsequent sessions with Asia led to the development of a card game, “Who Keeps The Memory”, designed to evoke childhood memories, reflect on family traditions, and reevaluate long-held perceptions.
In sessions led by Liubomyr Tymkiv, participants crafted postcards incorporating elements of old family photos from their archives. This exercise encouraged the depiction of intergenerational connections and introduced mail art as a method of preserving family memories. Liubomyr also guided participants in creating comics based on fond childhood memories, using unique stamps from his collection. The resulting postcards and comics were compiled into a zine, serving as a self-made book and an “album of friends”, documenting memorable moments from the residency.
Olha Marusyn’s residency practice, “Movement Around an Object to Which There is No Access”, expanded her ongoing project, “Exercises Around the Void”. Participants first wrote texts about lost or unattainable objects, following museum cataloguing rules. Despite the guidelines calling for factual descriptions, many participants created literary-like stories. The practice’s core was to “entertain” or deeply consider these lost objects, finding a place in the body where the memory of the objects could linger. The subsequent sequence of movements inspired by these memories was recorded on video, resulting in a performance piece titled “Exercises Around the Void”. This shared bodily practice showcased the community’s memory of various significant artifacts, metaphorically “placed” within their bodies through simple, expressive movements.
The Distinctive Approach of the Program
Our art and community-oriented programs are defined by their fluid, open-ended nature, where the process itself is the greatest value. While we may not know at the outset what the final outcomes will be, something meaningful always emerges along the way. In the “Who Keeps The Memory” project, we co-created a range of artistic outputs and experiences:
- A card game, “Who Keeps The Memory”, developed with the Pidzamche community, engaging participants in recalling and sharing family traditions.
- Film documentation titled “Exercises Around the Void”, capturing the physical movement practices inspired by memories within the community.
- A unique series of postage stamps designed collaboratively, reflecting shared memories and creative impulses.
- An exhibition-installation featuring mapped places of memory and imagined future sites, combined with a collection of mail art postcards, collages, and jointly created comics.
- The community festival, Who Keeps The Memory In Our Families”, organized with partners and various Lviv communities, celebrating collective memory and shared narratives.
- Sessions of “joint programming” and “professional dreaming” facilitated by artists Yuliia Kosterieva and Yurii Kruchak (Open Place), in collaboration with NGO Insha Osvita and the Jam Factory Art Center team.
- Continuous creative impulses shared within the group, sparking ideas that may evolve into future projects.
Reflecting on these “impulses”, Yevheniia Nesterovych aptly noted:
Perhaps the true result of participatory practices should not be considered as ready-made art projects or even well-defined methodologies, as these evolve differently each time. Rather, it is the circles of connections built through shared creative work that resonate and support participants in the long run – a shared experience that is difficult to describe to those who haven’t been part of it.” (Yevheniia Nesterovych, “Interaction as the Basis of Everything”).
The shared experiences in this process often defy easy articulation. One participant from the community remarked:
“This offers a completely new perspective on how we engage with memories. These new approaches broaden the toolkit, allowing for their use beyond the Who Keeps The Memory program as many times as one wants.” (Yarema).
The Festival
The community festival “Who Keeps The Memory In Our Families” served as the culminating event of this residency. Its concept and format emerged organically from the collaborative work with this year’s partners, including the Center of Urban History and the City Museum. This evolution underscored the value of “open-source programming,” as described by Open Place artist Yurii Kruchak. Such a programming approach allows for changes driven by participant input, embraces the possibility of an undefined final result, and emphasizes the journey over a predetermined outcome. While there is a clear starting point and direction, the destination is determined by the collective process shaped by participants’ desires and needs.
The festival expanded the circle of participants and became a convergence point for various communities across Lviv. The dynamic exhibition of objects created by the Pidzamche community, alongside the ongoing practices led by artists Asia and Liubomyr, transformed all visitors into co-authors of the exposition. New contributions, such as mail art postcards or updated memory maps, could be added directly to the general exhibition, making it a living, evolving showcase of shared memory.
Though the term “festival” might seem incongruous during the ongoing full-scale Russian war in Ukraine, a community festival in this context signifies more than a celebration. It represents a collective act of storytelling, a space where personal and family narratives are shared, listened to, and valued. It is a fragile yet vital moment of openness, where sharing memories becomes an act of resistance against social amnesia. Through artistic practices, it becomes a means of transferring knowledge and preserving memory for future generations.
Curatorial text by Anna Gaidai