Places In Change

What makes us and our places? What makes our usual place, which we pass every day, in which we live, special? Why is it interesting for us to change our places, to visit new ones, but as a result, there are always those that we do not exchange for anything. Physical places and virtual places. Imaginary and real places. Text as a place, imagination as a virtual place. Memory.

The year 2022 — changed our established prejudices [those biases, from the English bias] in relation to local places, in relation to the perception of the global world. Everything seems to have remained in place, but at the same time it has changed its address, what in the digital world is called a URL. True, it is still somewhere there, on the servers, but the path to it is paved.

Give me a fulcrum and I will turn the Earth upside down - this Archimedean anthropocentric declaration is taken unexpectedly differently in the context of the twenties of the twenty-first century. It turns out that the Earth can be turned upside down by turning one point of support into its fragments scattered all over the Earth, the copypaste of the truth masks the truth about the essence of the point of support. Uncertainty and instability are the Zeitgeist of the twenties of the twenty-first century.

It would seem that the end of the world, which was talked about so loudly before the Millennium, has finally come and it looks not like a giant explosion of the Earth, but like a clogged memory cache. But it is enough to look into the history of cartography to understand that ideas about the Earth have changed over the centuries. Bias is dead - long live bias.

Thus, the world is a layering of our trials and errors—a map and checklist that we constantly iteratively improve. Layering is another key concept, both for the physical world and our mental state, for virtual digital systems for text, or art in general.
The visual communication of the Places in Change project is an attempt to graphically depict such a multi-layered nature of the project, which has the freedom to develop in every possible direction, with the building of the Hnat Hotkevich Palace as a kind of Archimedean Fulcrum.

Geological layering, servers and cables, imaginary layering of memories of home and ephemeral domesticity in emigration. A place creates shadows, and figures emerge from the senses. With each cycle and discharge of the processor, Hotkevich's polygonal sculpture becomes more detailed, growing out of the interaction of the Pidzamcha community and the Palace team. Labyrinths of memory, forced or accidental archeology, the layering of an invisible but completely formative factor — the sound space of the city, which, with the appearance of gasoline generators in our lives, is increasingly materializing. All this turns into a detailed scheme-map, which gradually grows with new layers and manifests itself gradually, being both a cause and an effect at the same time. Alpha and Omega.

Places in change - a project that united Lviv artists, researchers, publicists around the topic of place in the context of the Russian war in Ukraine. A series of lectures and master classes is designed to stir up visions and ideas in the participants and consider the topic of place from the perspective of wartime and how it changes our usual places, how the topic of locality is revealed from a historical perspective, how writers, forcibly displaced writers reveal the idea of ​​place and its changes in their texts, in particular, Yurko Bulka talks about privacy in the network and virtual places, Bohdan Shumylovych and Yurko Prokhasko considered the context of dreams. Evgeny Gulevich and Andriy Bondarenko talked about the Garden of Trenches.
Gulevich participated in the defense of Ukraine in 2022, in particular, his duties included digging trenches on the battlefield. Evgeny was shot several times, but once he was hit for good. Gulevich was killed by a sniper's bullet.

Branding for the project is a layering of parallel worlds, places that, on the one hand, look like engineering architectural schemes, mock-ups, in a 3D section in an iometoic perspective, but there is also a certain mythical, irrational component, it manifests itself in certain non-characteristic elements placed in unusual places, although in general the whole composition looks very engineering, and repeats the schematic architectural section, allegorically creating a tree of the main thematic points of the project. Each floor is a separate topic for a workshop or lecture.