Public spaces and infrastructural networks are created to meet the daily transportation needs of the communities that use them. Places of gathering and meeting, transfer points, recognizable symbols of cities, but also border crossings, logistics centers and warehouses are being built as utilitarian architecture, sometimes taking the form of valuable architecture.

What the migration crisis triggered by Russia’s aggression against Ukraine in 2022 has shown is that these places, which perform logistical functions on a daily basis, are able to function on a much larger, hard-to-predict scale in a crisis situation, along with a huge flow of people and goods. To meet such challenges, they must be properly designed, built and maintained.

With “Networks of Support” international project, we ought to examine the reflection of social processes in the changes that have taken place in the spaces of transportation, logistics, or energy transmission in the countries of our region – Poland, Ukraine, Czech Republic and Germany. How do we prepare public spaces for crisis – from war migrations to floods to pandemics? How can we use the shared experience of countries in the region to build more crisis-resilient cities? There have also been changes in the way institutions – museums, galleries, houses of culture – operate.

At the time of the largest influx of people from Ukraine to neighboring countries, these institutions provided premises for purposes such as a day care center, temporary accommodation, language school, or meeting place. Not infrequently, the new functions have stayed with the institutions permanently, making their space and offerings more inclusive and diverse than before. Cross-border cultural exchanges on a social and institutional level have been revived by the need to cooperate and provide support.

Organizations and institutions engaged in the project

VI PER Gallery in Prague presented an exhibition “Critical Infrastructures” focusing on transportation and infrastructure, understood as a tool for distributing and organizing power relations. The networks that ensure our daily functioning, such as railroads, highways, pipelines and fiber optics, play a very important role in the context of political change and changing power dynamics, as we have recently seen in the context of the war in Ukraine.

The exhibition addressed not only the real meaning, fragility and vulnerability of critical infrastructure, but also focused on reflecting on how these structures shape the physical landscape, architecture and space, as well as the collective memory of our shared history of our geopolitical region with the theme of the Friendship (Druzhba) pipeline opened in 1964, which connects Russia to points in Ukraine, Poland, Belarus, Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Austria and Germany.

Cooperation with the Ukrainian association Vitsche in Berlin
Research-artistic seminar and performative actions in the city space, June-October 2024

Ukrainian artists and activists working as part of the Vitsche group stationed in Germany will diversify the “Networks of Support” project with performative actions, involving the public of Berlin’s public spaces, in the summer of 2024. Intermedia, artistic displays in the urban fabric will illustrate a reflection on the challenges and difficulties of Ukrainians in cultivating and internationally promoting their own culture and identity in the face of years of Russian imperial oppression and currently ongoing wartime aggression.

Artists working in Ukraine, Poland and Germany will be invited to join the project. For Vitsche, it is the common spaces, such as streets or squares, and public buildings that are the field of artistic struggle.

In 2022, at the Pilecki Institute in Berlin, the Ukrainian community organized an aid and information center in cooperation with Poles, and under the neighboring Brandenburg Gate they jointly protested against Russian aggression. The planned artistic activities will be a continuation of the cooperation that began then. The Pilecki Institute in Berlin will be involved in the activities.

Cooperation with the Center for Urban Culture of East Central Europe in Lviv
Interviews with cultural workers – turn 2023/2024, autumn 2024

A team of cultural researchers in Lviv will address the topic of oral history in wartime, as an invisible but highly valuable social infrastructure for survival, culture and imagination. Interviews will be conducted with Polish and Ukrainian cultural workers and preservationists on the protection of heritage in wartime, as well as with those responsible for critical infrastructure sites that Russian troops take as prime targets for attack.

How has operating under threat affected the work of the institution? What is a wartime cultural institution – both in terms of the responsibilities and activities of the staff, as well as spaces such as exhibition halls and offices? How has the urgent need for support affected cooperation between the Polish and Ukrainian cultural sectors?

The result of the cooperation with the Center will be popular-scientific texts published in the quarterly “autoportret”, published within the framework of the “Support Networks” project in 2024, and an event in Lviv in autumn 2024, which will also present activities in Poland, the Czech Republic and Germany. Activities in Ukraine will be supported by the Polish Institute in Kiev.

Cooperation with the quarterly magazine “autoportret”

In the summer of 2024, an issue of the quarterly “autoportret” (published by the Małopolska Institute of Culture) will be published as an integral part of the project. The issue will feature a summary of research and activities, interviews, as well as texts and visual material from the experts and artists involved. The publication will appear in Polish and English, in print and online.