THE ART OF SURVIVAL
Ravenna Westerhout, 2023
Site: Wartorn Ukraine
Research: www.daas.academy/research/resilience
The Art of Survival is an ongoing research and film project that documents the role of art, architecture, and cultural production in times of war, focussing on wartime Ukraine.
Through documentary filmmaking, field research, interviews, and public engagement, the project brings together artists, architects, writers, and cultural workers. Instead of following the scenes of carnage that leading media so often show, this study follows the alternative scenes of the role of art and architecture and of artists’ and architects’ engagements during war.
War itself cannot be considered directly a creative force. However, the external forces on a besieged city stimulate a specific human reaction that lead to the creation of new spaces and new ways of living. Architects and artists are operating in an imagined and ever-changing world and their role changes. The work examines how art functions as a form of resilience, resistance, and survival, and how cultural production responds to the destruction of identity and everyday life.
The outcome takes the form of a documentary film, research publications, public programmes, screenings, lectures, and ongoing field documentation. Initiated following the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the project is developed in collaboration with writer Jaap Scholten and supported through research conducted at the DAAS Academy, Royal Institute of Art Stockholm, with a particular focus on the concept of resilience.
This project is created in cooperation with Jaap Scholten.