The rozdILovI Project, initiated by the ArtPole Agency, combines the contemporary poetry, music and visual imagery. Participants (Olia Mykhailiuk – concept, Serhiy Zhadan - text / voice, Oleksiy Vorsoba and Tomasz Sikora - music, Serhiy Pyliavets – visualization) live in different cities - Kyiv, Kharkiv, Minsk, Wroclaw, Ivano-Frankivsk - and each has an individual project, but once in a while they gather to search for new approaches and levels of interaction.
ArtPole Agency Director Myroslava Ganyushkina talks about updated project in collaboration with the Polish arts foundation Hermetic Garage, working with foreign translators, e-cards with Zhadan's poetry, presentations abroad and further plans for rozdILovI.
"rozdILovI" first emerged in 2012 and since then the project has undergone a lot of change. It was created by Olia Mykhailiuk, the director of the ArtPole Agency. The project came about quite spontaneously as if born in on spring winds. At an event we were doing in Odesa we had scheduled Serhiy Zhadan and his band Zhadan i Sobaki. His book "Guns and Knives" was coming out at the time and the idea was to create a multidisciplinary project that would combine poetry, music and visualization. We searched a long time for the form of it, changing participants often, and now only three "originals" remain from the original project: Olia Mykhailiuk, Serhiy Zhadan and Oleksiy Vorsoba. The final configuration includes a musician from Wroclaw, Tomasz Sikora and video artist from Ivano-Frankivsk, Serhiy Piliavets.
The rozdilovi.org website was up before all this, publishing texts in Polish, German and English that appear in the rozdILovI project. In the part of the project that was supported by Culture Bridges, we wanted to get to know the translators and discuss the specifics of working with the text and what the kind of potential that the multimedia format affords. Poetry is difficult in translation—conveying emotion, rhythm, silence, tone, mood and shades of meaning—these can be lost. The use of other artistic disciplines helps preserve the feel of the work.
In March 2019 we invited translators working with Ukrainian poetry, and also critics, philosophers and designers, to meet in Kyiv. Serhiy Zhadan introduced us to translators of his texts working abroad and we corresponded with them electronically. We also brought in cultural anthropologist and philosopher Benjamin Cope (UK, Poland) and designer Sasha Moskowchuk (Ukraine). Within a few days, closed work in progress sessions for rozdILovI had worked out a multidisciplinary translation format in which graphic images, videos, sounds of music and voice, art direction and lighting help convey the poetry's sense to foreign language audiences. On 3 March, working with website developers and art critics, we held a public event at Mystetskyi Arsenal, during which we also featured some separate pieces. Building from the translations that were worked out, a series of video poetic works in different languages were created for the website, fragments of which were performed during rozdILovI. Poetry / Music / Visualization - Signs of Interaction project, at Mystetskyi Arsenal on 22 May. It ended up as one of the highest drawing events at the Book Arsenal.
Site visitors can view videos from past performances and texts of new compositions. They can also learn more about the project, join up, and create a personal e-card using a special design and a quote from a selected poem both in Ukrainian and in other languages. We don't strip it of context, rendering it meaningless. This is where Olia Mykhailiuk did a lot of work, breaking down the Ukrainian poetry so that each fragment carried a certain message or emotion. The translators had two paths: translate these separate fragments or translate whole poems and divide those into meaningful passages in their language.
"At rozdilovi.org it's also possible to listen to and view a piece of music, pick out an individual track or make your own arrangement, which is pretty interesting. For example, if it's a sunny day, type in the word "sun" and you'll see all the lines of poems by Sergei Zhadan that contain the word. And there are different kinds of "suns"—from dark suns to too much sun. We tried this during presentations, asking our listeners in different countries what word they'd like to see. The responses were curious: in Italy, for example, they wanted the words "love" and "heart."
"There were different approaches possible for the job of breaking the poem up into fragments. You could think of it as setting aside the integral sense of a poem lost in this method or you could look at each line as an individual work in itself, and one accompanied by the graphics and the space in which it exists. I decided to go with the latter out of curiosity, feeling that it made sense to give each phrase a chance to exist independently", - Claudia Dathe, the translator into German
The project elicited a tremendous response. An important aspect of all of this is that when translators entered the process the project took on a life in other countries. It wasn't just a formal conference, but something that drove the desire for it to be shown abroad and to find reliable partners abroad for further collaboration in cross-sectoral artistic practices. It helped build intercultural dialogue between artists, translators, art critics and viewers.
The site's audience has expanded geographically and now includes visitors from Ukraine, the USA, Poland, Germany, Belarus, Russia and other countries. The involvement of the professional community from abroad into the cultural processes in Ukraine and the integration of Ukraine into the context of the contemporary European art scene has been given a boost, as has the professional growth of our artists and project managers.
On the 22nd we played at Mystetskyi Arsenal supported by a Culture Bridges grant. On the 25th we were at Bialystok with a project supported by the Ukrainian Cultural Fund. The UCF grant was for further development of multilingual history, adding more English and Polish with some fiction texts translated fully and underwriting two shows in Poland to get a grasp on what was needed to better present the project abroad. There were also presentations made of the site and varying language versions given in the Ukrainian cities of Kyiv, Kharkiv and Starobilsk, and abroad in Warsaw, Wroclaw, Białystok, Berlin, Prague and Rome.
In the portion supported by the UCF, we had a series of strategic sessions about positioning and identifying partners, audiences, improving the functionality and usability of the site. We continued our project promotional campaign during June-July 2019, expanding the site's audience in Ukraine and the EU. We plan to further develop the site and work on promoting it.
Our experience with the production in Poland showed us that we need to find another format to show this to foreign-language audiences. And now we are on the lookout with a chance to involve some new artists in the project. For example, during Serhiy's presentation in Warsaw, Polish translator Michal Petryk read the Polish translation. It's challenging for a foreign audience to absorb that volume of texts in their own language, even with the help of a multidisciplinary presentation.
We're looking for a form that will work and Serhiy has full confidence we'll find it. He's prepared to submit his work, but we haven't yet decided the manner with which the translations of his texts will be presented. During one stage, instead of reading the text, we included choreographer by Austrian dancer Andrea Maria Handler. That captures exactly the direction we're thinking of moving at the moment.
We have been working with documentary film director Vadim Ilkov for a long time and invited him to shoot rozdILovI to provide us some presentation material. Vadym was interested in the idea more than just as documentary, but with the real vision of an auteur, and filmed our performance using 11 cameras. We released it as a concert film—rozdILovI Live—that was available in limited Ukrainian release in December 2019.
Now we're looking into bringing the project to a more interactive public space. Not just a stage and an audience but an interaction between project authors and viewers. We took this concept and applied for a House of Europe grant. If they award us with support, we'll get to work fleshing it out.
For further development we're now looking for partners from Germany. We had no previous, close ties with representatives of the arts scene in Germany, and knew very few cultural managers there, and had no partner outlets. Due the Berlin presentation of this project we've now personally encountered a highly interested audience and plan to actively cooperate with them. German translator Claudia Dathe also greatly appreciated her experience with us and is very supportive of further collaborations. The highest traffic we get on our website is from Italy, so we plan to develop our level of cooperation there as well.
Photo credits: https://rozdilovi.org/, Radek Kaminski, Vitaliy Mariash, Dmytro Stupnik, ArtPole, Mystetskyi Arsenal.
Video: KyivMusicFilm
Quotes: life.pravda, ukr.radio
