Authors

Discussion

In this paper, I discuss the perceived crisis of cultural institutions in the de-industrializing monotowns of the Ukrainian East between 2014 and 2022, and the emergence of grass-roots heritage-making and community building practices, a process Kateryna Iakovlenko has referred to as the formation of “alternative institutionality,” in post-2014 Donbas. Drawing on fieldwork in the chemical-making city of Sieverodonetsk, the coal-mining settlement of Lysychansk, and the metallurgy port town of Mariupol, I argue that “artivist” communities played leading roles in modelling an alternative cultural politics – preservationist, politically inclusive and socially conscious – for their communities. Building on the work of anthropologists and cultural historians, such as Emily Channel Justice and Jessica Zychowicz, who root the volunteerism and self-organization of Maidan in the neoliberalization and “withdrawal of the state” in post-Soviet Ukraine, I see the growth in activist archiving, curating, and artmaking as forms of coordinated self-reliance that emerged in response to perceived state institutional inadequacies. Turning to analyse the art and creative practice itself, I suggest that this work often articulates a poised critique of the political and social crises affecting the East (de-industrialization, de-communization, Russian military violence and occupation, infrastructural collapse, urban dereliction), while also imagining alternative, better worlds for local communities