Residency and artistic intervention – Darya Tsymbalyuk
June – July 2024
The Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life
Siliștea Snagovului village
“If, following rivers and rivulets, lagoons, meadows, plavni, and forests, you keep going down southwest from the south of Ukraine, you might eventually pass over the Stația experimentală de cercetare pentru artă și viață. Perhaps, then, looking up at the sky for a second, I will catch a glimpse of you, a greeting from places that have raised me.
Following, the Black Sea-Mediterranean Flyway, eight million birds make their way over my home region in the south of Ukraine, and over Bucharest and the eastern coast of Romania. They keep going south.
Russia’s war on Ukraine pulled me closer to the south, the south, which remains partially occupied, the south that remains under attack, and the south that raised me. Bucharest is, of course, also of the south, and though people in trams and trolleybuses, bakeries and swimming pools address me in a language I don’t know, there are many things that I know and recognise. Such is a turquoise house on Pescari street, which was made in the same way houses in the villages of my home region have been built for centuries, in the same way my mother remembers houses were built in her childhood too. Thinking with the saman/chirpici of houses close and far, as well as the birds that see them from above on their migratory routes, I follow the pull of the south as the pull of home.”
Darya Tsymbalyuk writes, researches, and draws. She is interested in stories about more-than-human worlds we live in and in looking for possibilities to tell these stories in a way that is attentive to other-than-human beings. She is a Visiting Fellow at New Europe College and an incoming Assistant Professor at the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago. You can find works by Darya at daryatsymbalyuk.com.
Darya Tsymbalyuk’s residency takes place in the frame of the project ABC and is supported by ERSTE Foundation.
Architecture, Biodiversity, Culture [ABC]. Building ecological institutions for culture is an European cooperation project situated at the intersection between cultural practices, eco-architecture and ecosystems preservation. Initiated by a consortium of organisations active in the fields of culture, contemporary art, architecture, civic activism and eco-sustainable community practices, the project proposes a participatory process of building and cultural contextualising of ecological prototypes to be used by cultural institutions. ABC operates on four sites in Romania, Bulgaria and France: Silistea Snagovului, a village in the proximity of Bucharest, near a protected area of lake and forest; Brezoi, a small town in the South-Western part of Romania, in a mountaneous area and close to an important river; Dren, a village outside of Sofia, in a hilly area; and Bagneux, in the peripheral neighourhoods of Paris.
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.
