#ekoart

So whilst the mines and steel mills are still belching and roaring, they are no longer owned by the state but a new class of plutocrats who happened to be in the right place at the right time back in the crazy ‘90s. Donetsk’s Capo di tutti capi is Rinat Leonidovych Akhmetov, son of a Tatar miner, industrial magnate, billionaire, politician, football fan, and a man who knows how to buy himself the best libel lawyers.

He has elevated his beloved team Shakhtar Donetsk to international status, and erected for it the magnificent Donbas Stadium which will soon host the European Championships and the preening starlets of England and France. Mr Akhmetov doesn’t appreciate being asked too many questions about how he made his money and, as long as his municipal munificence continues, it’s doubtful the citizens of Donetsk will care too much either. As the picture below shows though, Donetsk is a city of growing inequality between the penthouse and the pavement.

Whilst in Donetsk I encountered a variety of people and places which, in different ways, are seeking alternative ways of moving the city into the future. It began at my hotel, the in-your-face Liverpool Art Hotel. The owner clearly has a serious crush on the Beatles and Liverpool FC and, in its sheer over-the-top exuberance, it works. It’s a shame therefore that every morning my chirpy Merseyside mood was snuffed out the moment I bounced into the breakfast room. Styled as an industrial canteen the staff were as miserable as sin as they slopped Varenyky on our plates. Despite my best efforts to greet them in Russian, with liberal gestures of здравствуйте! and доброе утро, most refused even to make eye contact.

This triggered off a good debate with my local hosts over the difference between tangible and intangible cultural assets. The hotel owner obviously understood the value of the former by filling his place with Liverpool-themed memorabilia. But he’d spectacularly overlooked that what makes a city like Liverpool so special is not just its music and its football, but mainly its people – their wit, humour and warm-heartedness.  You can change the look of a place in quite a short space of time but how many generations will it take before people in the former Soviet Union take pleasure in giving service to strangers?

All this was in stark contrast to the people who hosted my visit to Donetsk, Valentyna Sakhnenko and Daria Deriagina from the marvellous EkoArt youth organisation. EkoArt was set up in 1999 to give young people in the city an outlet for their creative energies. As I know myself, growing up in a once-great industrial city can be a stultifying experience. Society expects you to follow the time-honoured path, which you already know is heading over a cliff and, even if it weren’t, you’d want to try something else anyway. But how, where and with whom? EkoArt provides that space. They run projects with evocative titles like ‘We create to live’ and ‘Give your friend a hand’ and, as if in response to my joyless breakfast bar staff, the uplifting photography gallery ‘Donetsk Smiles’. 

They are now working on an ‘alternative art guide’ to Donetsk. It strikes me as a great idea to offer a different picture of a city from that offered by the city’s official tourist guide – and also from the increasingly risible Lonely Planet guides which seem to reduce every place to a tawdry list of ‘must-see’ bars and shops. On the contrary, if you visit Donetsk soon you will have the chance, thanks to EkoArts to visit ‘The forgotten places of our city’; ‘The most “Donetsk” places and events’; ‘Unusual points of view on “usual” places of the city’; ‘Romantic places’ AND ‘Slagheaps’.  Love it!

And, even as the blast furnaces continue to spew flame and ash and the klaxon calls the miners to another shift down below, there are other people bringing new ideas to the heart of the Donbass industrial zone.  Take Luba Michailova, who grew up the daughter of the director of one of the Soviet Union’s largest factories for the production of insulation material. Over 1000 people worked there until its protected market disappeared and it rapidly closed. The two of them set up a Foundation to transform the empty hulk into Izolyatsia - Platform for Cultural Initiatives.

  Her vision is to make it an international centre for contemporary art, surrounded by an ecological park which, to say the least, is a bold ambition. Izolatsyia has already hosted exhibitions and residencies by artists such as Boris Mikhailov and Cai Guo-Qiang so it means business, but will no doubt need time to find its true identity. Whether  Luba Michailova has visited some of the amazing artistic transformations of industrial ruins in Germany, Britain and the US I don’t know, but I wouldn’t be surprised to hear she’d drawn inspiration from the Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord. The difference, one suspects, is in the business model. The great icons of the Ruhrgebiet Route der Industriekultur were funded largely by state and EU funds and now raise increasing amounts of their revenue from tourism and enterprise. Izolatsyia on the other hand harks back to an older model of patronage of the arts by wealthy dynasties.

However, it’s not entirely clear how the Michailov family came by its wealth or how they propose to finance their dream of a ‘creative village’ in the longer term. I posed a few questions in this vein to the PR who was assigned to me on my visit. She responded by throwing questions back at me, which left me feeling perplexed and uneasy. Certainly not the kind of openness I would normally associate with the creative pioneers I’ve met in similar project in other countries.

So in the end I left Izolyatsia with an ambivalent feeling. I would always feel inclined to admire anyone who tried to do something unusual, bold and creative in such a blighted post-industrial landscape as this. But in the world of post-Soviet high finance nothing is ever what it seems to be so I remain to be reassured that this is a place that will put artists and the citizens of Donetsk first. I do so want it to be.