It was Lviv that educated and guided me, made me feel and experience. It felt like Vogel herself took me on a journey around Lviv and introduced to people interested in its past and present. Without open-minded, warm and knowledgeable people of Lviv I would not be able to have the freedom, the doubts and the confidence to explore.

One of the project contributors, Iryna Starovoyt (lecturer, literature critic, poet, translator) articulated Lviv’s uniqueness so eloquently: ‘This city has a neutron bomb effect: about 98% of its houses survived, while over 90% of its population, the social fabric of the city, were utterly devastated. Forceful change of borders, occupation, Holocaust and Soviet deportations have changed the population of the city. We know instinctively the meaning of the term “displaced persons”, as we here are all descendants of these people.’

In between my visits to the city I was reading books that inspired me to go back each time. I would like to quote a couple here:

“Why should everything be made clear and be brought into the light? Why keep things? Just because you have it does not mean you have to pass it on. But leaving is hard. The problem is that I am in the wrong century to burn things. I am the wrong generation to let it go. I think of all those careful burnings by others, the systematic erasing of stories, the separations between people and their possessions, and then of people from their families and families from their neighbourhoods. And then from their country.” (Edmund de Waal in ‘The Hare with Amber Eyes’).

Another Londoner, Iain Sinclair, in a very different sort of a journey ‘Liquid city’, a collaborative exploration of London’s hidden streets, cemeteries, parks and canals, observes his “random documentary impulse to sketch, note, improvise, revise, double back. For whatever reason, it seems to be important to hold on to these things”.

I struggled with piecing the narrative together. Fragments. Fractions. Layers. Traces. White spaces. I went back to Lviv in January 2017. It happened to be a super cold week. My 24hrs train journey from Moscow was quite something – Orthodox Christmas, an almost empty train carriage, icy snow on the inside of the windows. This time, in addition to taking photographs, I shot video resting my camera on the monopod which at the same time served as my walking stick wandering around snowy Lviv in the footsteps of Debora. I have explored further the concepts of melancholy, yearning, waiting, distance, empty spaces, time and memory in the city, forms and shapes in Vogel’s writings. Having climbed the stairs of my train back to Moscow, I realised it was the last carriage and so I could film leaving the Art-Nouveau Lviv Railway Station through the small murky window. It later became the opening and closing scenes of the film. The final strokes happened on my visit in May. Footage shot in two Lviv tram depots resonated with Vogel’s urban motives, roofs of Syhiv multi-storey suburbia complemented and contrasted the roofs of old Lviv shot over the previous Winter and Summer. I met Oles Dzyndra, found the common language and we agreed he would host the exhibition at the Museum of Ideas. The project was coming together!

One of the most touching things about the Lviv exhibition was the visitors’ responses and comments they leave. People shared what they felt, what it made them think about. They wrote that photographs breathed life, that the exposition unfolded in time and space. They talked about human presence they sensed in imagery. They said that we are not trying to evoke pain or guilt  but show how history is helping to reinterpret Lviv as people see it now. They reflected on things I didn’t think about or didn’t notice myself. I hope this means we succeeded in creating a meaningful experience (with photographs, videos, music, texts) for the audience, that the project isn’t static and will evolve as we move forward.

Once the exhibition was over, I came across Philippe Sands with his fascinating book ‘East West Street’ and essay ‘My Lviv’. And shortly after Olesya and I took part in the fascinating event at Rich Mix London « Dash Café: Lviv on the borders of Europe » where we showed our film and discussed this city of multiple names and identities with Philippe Sands and Dr Uilleam Blacker.

More layers, more connections, more twists of fate.

4 / You participated in the Catena of Berlin. Can you tell us 2 or 3 impressions of this workshop and what does the Catena represent to you after this experience?

Given the fact my paternal grandparents were born and grew up in South Ukraine and Crimea, and my maternal grandfather fought in Western Ukraine during WWII and was stationed in Lviv after the liberation, I saw the ‘Fragments of Memory’ project as an opportunity to engage with the people of Lviv, to share my work and discuss Jewish heritage in the context of another mainstream culture. Last spring I asked Serhiy Savchenko for his advice on exhibition spaces in Lviv and he suggested the Museum of Ideas. He also invited me to join the group of artists for the Catena Roots Workshop in Berlin in July 2017, which turned out to be an unforgettable experience. I would like to stress the human kindness and openness of Berlin residents and of Ukrainian artists, the welcome we felt to be part of the Catena family. Catena has given us the space and the time to be ourselves, to meet like-minded people, to reflect on our practice, to create new work and to try new things – we were so lucky to attend lithography and silk-screen printing workshops at Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien!

The Catena workshop coupled with my research for the ‘Fragments of Memory’ project prompted me to look at my own family history. 2018 marks the 100^th anniversary since my grandfather Mikhail Gefter was born in Crimea. I am eager to find out who my grandfather was beyond his philosophical and historical writings, and the internet journal Gefter.ru, an excellent Russian resource in the sphere of the social sciences and intellectual thought, named after him.

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1 / In Lviv, just finished the exhibition that you realized, « Fragments of Memory ». You yourself were born in Moscow, of a Jewish family and live in Great Britain. So why Lviv? Can you tell us about the genesis of this project?

I was indeed born in Moscow. Looking back at my growing up in an assimilated environment, I recall not understanding what it was to be Jewish, why my nose was the way it was, why my surname was different from many others, why some kids called me derogatory names. Despite occasionally celebrating Jewish holidays at my great-aunt’s flat, I felt disconnected from the traditions of my grandparents who never talked about their childhood in Ukraine and Belorussia. Besides, I did lots of sport unlike anyone else in my family circle, what added to the lack of understanding of who I was and of the world around.

I was 19 when I went to Israel. I was independent since an early age, but this first solo travelling opened the door – I felt free for the first time. So when a friend of my father asked me what were my plans, I surprised myself by saying I wanted to go to Europe. But nobody waits for us in Europe?! – his words hung in the air. On my return to Moscow, I became driven like never before – I had to get to Europe. Dutch scholarship, student visas, odd jobs, and in 2003 I found the place I fell in love with – London. London shaped me. Local and global stories, people from all walks of life. An outsider in me was accepted here and yet I kept looking for something – I wished to belong but not to get lost. Through doing London-based and overseas projects about other communities (What is Chats Palace?, From Pop Art to Community Arts, Playing In or Out?, PICS, War on the Home Front, Ikakumo) I was searching for my own identity.

My grandfather was a historian who said that genocide is never against someone, genocide is always against everyone. He never talked about growing up without a father, about losing his mother and cousin in the Holocaust and his uncle in Stalin’s purges. For him, as for many people of his generation, there was a life before WWII and a life after. But I knew none of it when in Spring 2015, out of the blue, an email from my uncle popped up. Attached were the scans of four postcards sent by my great-grandmother shortly before she was killed in the mass-murder of Jewish population in Crimea in 1941. It was the first time I heard about her. She had a name. She was a piano teacher.

A few months later, my new musician friend from Ukraine, Olesya Zdorovetska, invited me to come with her to Lviv, to the annual Book Forum. I agreed without a slight hesitation. Those postcards were on my mind, even though Lviv and Crimea are 1000 km apart. I also felt the urge to revisit my childhood places in the Carpathian Mountains, near Lviv. But most importantly, after years of wanderings, I felt like I was getting closer to finding the right doors.

With Olesya and alone, I explored the cobble streets, peeped into Lviv courtyards, climbed onto the roofs, wandered in the cemeteries. At the Book Forum Olesya bought a collection of poetry by Debora Vogel, a female writer, art critic and intellectual, who perished in Lviv ghetto in 1942 and remained in obscurity for a long time. Dr. Karolina Szymaniak from Poland introduced her work to the world in the last decade. Over the next two years, we walked the places Vogel inhabited and wrote about, met people who survived the war or were born long after and reconnected with the disappeared world. We have encountered the story of the former Jewish museum.

What is remembered and what is forgotten? How do you talk about what you can’t know? The work that resulted from our journey is concerned with the fragmented nature of memory, the presence and absence of people, personal stories pointing to Leopolis/Lemberg/Lwow/Lviv.

 2 / What is the figure of Debora Vogel for you? A favourite quote from her poetry?

Between the two wars Lviv was this inspiring metropolis for modernist thought in philosophy, mathematics, literary theory and arts, as well as a place of social and ethnic conflicts. It was among Lviv intellectuals and artists, during the period of rising chauvinism and anti-semitism, that the idea of an inclusive and open culture was formed. Vogel wrote in Polish, Hebrew, German and Yiddish which she learned as an adult. She moved between different languages, cultures, groups, and places offering reflections on the contemporary urban experience, mass culture, women’s presence in the public space, social exclusions and colonialism. For me, Vogel became this figure who epitomised Lviv as a microcosm of Europe’s 20th century and my own concept of European identity –  the melting pot of different mentalities, cultures and ethnicities, in which I was looking for myself.

The first three lines of Vogel’s poem ‘Hayzer baynakht’ (Top Figurn, 1930) resonated with me the most and so we chose them to welcome the visitors as they entered the exhibition space, aka the leitmotif of the show.

hayzer baynakht (Yiddish transliteration)

nakhtlekhe gasn voltn zayn farloyrn

un mir voltn zayn farlozn:

ven nisht hayzer.

Будинки вночi (translated by Yurko Prokhasko)

нічні вулиці були би втрачені,

а ми були би покинуті:

якби не будинки.

Houses at Night (translated by Anastasiya Lyubas)

night streets would be lost

and we would be abandoned:

if not for the houses.

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