-
The importance of healing
2 years today since my hip surgery, the words of the Nigerian poet Ijeoma Umebinyuo come to mind: “You see, in a culture like ours, we were never taught the importance of healing, we were only taught to survive. Not heal. Bury, survive.” Recovery Song is the handmade book of my recovery process from the […]
-
12 Bernstein
It was in the Summer 2016 when I first encountered the story of the derelict building at 12 Sholem Aleichem street (formerly Bernstein street). I came to Lviv to research Debora Vogel and her literary and artistic circles of the inter-war period. Wherever I turned I seemed to hear about the building – Google, resources at the Lviv Centre for Urban […]
-
Lviv-London Double Impact
Join us at Pushkin House, London on November 14 for a special evening of imagery, history, words and music with London resident Asya Gefter, who has just launched the ‘Fragments of Memory’ project in Lviv, and Lviv resident Mark Tokar, double bass player and a key figure in the Ukrainian free jazz scene. Over the past two […]
-
Acacias Bloom
Last year I have been awarded an Asylum Arts Grant to collaborate with a Ukrainian musician Olesya Zdorovetska to research Debora Vogel, an overlooked Polish Yiddish writer of poetry, prose, literary and art criticism from the 1930s avant-garde Lviv. And so in July 2016, supported by the Asylum Arts (US) and a-n Travel Bursary (UK) off we went on our audio-visual […]
-
Impromptu from the Carpathians
Last month I reconnected with the places of my childhood holidays – Lviv and the Carpathian mountains in Western Ukraine. This area (former Galicia) was for centuries on the crossroads between Middle and Eastern Europe, and so it is small wonder that it has become a melting pot of people and cultures – Ukrainian, Jewish, […]