Performance and exhibition project combining performance, installation, sound, poetic cinema, and an immersive exhibition. In collaboration Daria Lytvynenko and Jam Factory Art Center, Lviv, Ukraine. Supported by OeAD and Office Ukraine Austria, 2025.
Author Daria Lytvynenko, in collaboration with Austrian sculptor Jürgen Münzer, works with multimedia forms where the principle of spatial collage combines movement, physical theater, archival images, installation, sound, and poetic cinema. These elements build a fragmented story that aims to provoke the viewer to reflect on the present of the Crimean Peninsula in relation to mainland Ukraine and to grasp its cyclical history.
Blending absurdity, buffoonery, bizarre sculptures, masks, documentary and fictional characters, the performance explores the historical, cultural, and familial heritage connected to the peninsula. Together with the team, the author turns to both personal and collective identity, distorted by centuries of Russian colonial oppression. Today, this identity exists in a state of search and transformation, reflecting the layers of lived experience.
The Black Sea and native places, which carry bodily memory and recollections, simultaneously become a source of physical danger under enemy control, while the loss of direct connection to them turns into a pain that resonates in collective memory.
The project investigates how Russian propaganda, together with the romanticized image of Crimea’s southern coast, has turned into a tool for erasure and oblivion of local history.
It is a story about home — one that encompasses generations, events, and living beings, a home that now exists only in imagination: fragmented, altered, violated, yet still enduring.
Author, concept, director, text & video: Daria Lytvynenko Scenography, object creation & spatial design: Jürgen Münzer Performance & creation: Daria Lytvynenko with Yana Kolodiychuk & Mykola Naboka
Video design & editing: Stefan Krische
Sound design & composition: Clemens Poole
Costume design & creation: Yulia Makarenko
Artistic & movement consulting: Maria Shurkhal
Stage design & assistance: Sasha Bezyemska, Polina Zhilina Lighting design: Serhiy Klymets
Project manager: Yevheniia Melkonian
Production manager: Vlad Bilonenko
Curator of the project After Devastation: Liuba Ilnytska
Fotos: Malashyna Alona