Curator—Yevhenii Stasinevych
The Kharkiv Literary Museum is very much about Kharkiv: about its 1990s, when the museum was beginning to develop, and its 1920s, the spirit of which the museum manages to reflect without copying or parroting. Like the spirit of searching. And the Book Arsenal Festival, as a part of Mystetskyi Arsenal, is indeed about Kyiv: about a new institutionalization in the new century and about laying the groundwork for cultural opportunities after the disruptive year of 2014. Great events of great cities, both physically and meaningfully. Now there is an additional common framework: the Great War, which these cities often experience in their own ways. This implies significant differences, but also characteristic similarities.
The fact that founded in the fall of 2022, the Fifth Kharkiv Literary Festival is visiting the largest book festival in Kyiv in the spring of 2024 is quite natural. When in Kyiv, but more about Kharkiv. When the general theme is Life on the Edge and the accompanying theme is Cities on the Edge. On the edge of life and destruction, of the past that holds one back and the painful transformations that must draw one into the future. The edge of the unknown: maybe it’s a deterioration, or even an emptiness, or maybe a new quality. However, there are definitely new experiences on the very edge.
They can be defined in different ways: experiences of geographical and historical borderlands, frontier, and existence at the edge. A borderline of the immediate, as well as civilizational and cultural. And also a wartime one. There is the experience of the capital and the experience of the eastern outpost. They are being lived through here-and-now and are accompanied by artistic reflection and activities. This deserves a closer look.
How can we explain the outburst of cultural life in Kharkiv from both Kharkiv and Kyiv perspectives? Why is culture not falling away “according to the principle of residuality” but is becoming the core of discussions in the public sphere? Why are there even more conversations about history in our lives today—and if this is the case, what is a more precise view of cities and the country as embodiments of the borderlands?
Thus, cities, thus, the edge. And also war and culture. And we are in the middle of it all. Often lacking the exact words, but having a need to speak. So, let the City help us.
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“I am madly in love with the city. I like to go out of my room at night, stroll down the noisy boulevards, drink that noise, smell the benzene, and then go to the abandoned neighborhoods to see Japanese lanterns—it seems so—in triangles of numbers: a house on the corner, #: is on fire.”