The Construction Festival is situated in Dnipro, Ukraine. Katya Rusetska is co-initiator and program curator of the festival. She speaks about how there has been a lot of conversations during the residency about how artists continue to do what they do during war, and how the war situation becomes the context of their work and their lives. – We started to work on the idea of the festival right before the revolution, and the initial idea was to have a “normal” contemporary, experimental music festival. Katya takes a deep breath, and continues: –Dnipro is one of the biggest cities in Ukraine, in the eastern central part, and on the cultural map, there were moments of something amazing appearing there, but a lot of people were moving to the capital, or to eastern or western Europe.  She tells me that at some point a choice had  to be made, regarding whether or not to stay in Dnipro and giving the city one more chance while doing something that was interesting to them,; trying to make a community that was lacking there, or do as so many others were doing, namely leaving Dnipro to start up somewhere else. The question was answered by the reality of the situation, as more and more people were being displaced and coming to Dnipro, and they started fundraising and organizing and helping in various ways.

The cultural center Katya is a part of running is called DCCC, Dnipro Center for Contemporary Culture. Katya laughs a bit about the dryness of the name, and explains that they needed an ambitious name to get support from the municipality. – A lot of things changed in the time before the full-scale invasion, there were a lot of interesting dynamics, changes, more and more international collaborations, obviously some funds from EU and the U.S., which gave us more opportunities, but also people from underground culture and smaller labels were creating interesting things. And during this time [Gothenburg based artists] David Sabel and Kajsa Magnarsson were performing in Dnipro at the Construction Festival. Some years before that I met Christian Pallin from Koloni, and that’s how it started. He and other European organisers became aware of the experimental and non-commercial scene that we were running. And from time to time we had some Swedish artists at our festival… So this exchange and relationship with Gothenburg based artists started already in 2017.

Mila tells me that she only joined the Construction team a year ago. – So it’s kind of fresh, she says. – It’s really interesting what [Katya] said about the commercial or experimental point of view. Mila explains that especially for young artists starting out during this time of war and confusion, it’s really important to have places like DCCC and festivals like Construction, which prove that there is still a community to be involved in, an artistic context in which one’s work is needed.

Last November they did an edition of the Construction Festival which they called Ukrainian Hardcore: Learning from the Grassroots. Katya explains that they use the word Hardcore as the symbol of a base made from leftovers of construction sites, rebuilding something from trash and then use it as a very stable base… 

– There’s a lot of things falling apart around us, but let’s think about these things like a base that we can use, because there’s so many initiatives now which manage to self-organize, which manage to create new tools and and ideas for how to survive and how to help other people. When you are in a state of war you always have this feeling that whatever you do it’s never enough and you can be  volunteering 24/7 but you will still talk about decolonization. You can earn money and send everything but you will feel that you still need to do more. A lot of artists incorporate this volunteering or activism practice into their own work.

Katya points out a positive change in the solidarity between cities in Ukraine and an interest in rediscovering what is happening in the art scene overall. People support each other. The is no municipal or state funding anymore, so they rely on EU and U.S. funding. Since the festival has existed for 10 years of work already, there is a large network to fall back on. But there’s a real feeling of living day by day. Katya says the Construction Festival would love to support artists more and always have a funding to give them a fee. That is one of their goals. – We are offering fees to the artists right now as well, but we are working on having a stable base/funding to do so without any worries.

Construction Festival currently offer 90 % of their events for free, and when they do sell tickets to a festival they donate all the money to their friends in the army.

Iryna says that due to Ukranian culture being under attack, Construction Festival is extra important now. – Museums and churches are being bombed and she says there seems to be a plan to wipe away memories and make people forget their roots. Iryna nods respectfully to Katya and Mila. – Construction Festival generates new Ukrainian artists, and that’s super strong. Thank you. 

Katya says that although it’s been very stressful to organise the festival during war time, there’s been great moments with people coming together, like the community kitchen, which didn’t just include cooking together but also talk about different political aspects, like minorities and decolonization.

When I ask where the three are living at the moment, Iryna tells me that she is based here in Gothenburg, Sweden, as a refugee with a permanent residency permit.