Slava Ukraini (Слава Україні)

Slava Ukraini is a meditation on the disruption to Ukrainian culture and sovereignty caused by the 2022 full scale Russian invasion.  In this VR experience, traditional embroidery is streamed as the visual focus, while spatialized recordings of battle threaten to disrupt this ancient folk tradition, itself a form of cultural memory and storytelling. The VR experience reorients the typical expectations of immersion characterized by VR headsets as screen-based experiences in which the user has ultimate control. By disrupting VR’s 360-degree field of vision, “Slava Ukraini” appears connected to the viewer’s perspective, ensuring that, regardless of where one looks, the translucent video appears squarely in the immersant’s line of sight—a way to re-assert the flow, the assurance that the stream of Ukrainian tradition will prevail despite the disruption and threat of erasure posed by war. Visually, the remnants of buildings and the vestiges of cultural and ethnographical elements, such as traditional embroidery, displayed on the fixed and suspended video screen, stand in stark contrast to the creator’s personal conception, rooted in an historical framework that is bounded by an earlier fracture with the mother country in the early 20th century; the stream is steeped in folklore and enduring traditions transmitted across generations.

While the experience doesn’t literally address water, per se, it works with tradition and cultural practices as a kind of metaphorical stream, an imaginative river that connects generations through time. Time acts as a river that carries the language, values, and traditions through the generations, even though it is sometimes disrupted by threats to its sovereignty, to its ability to continue to flow from one generation to the next, but through the continued practice of traditions in dance, for example, and arts and crafts, such as embroidery, as featured in the video elements of this VR creation, the stream of cultural memory can be preserved and assured of a future, not just in Ukraine, but also throughout her diaspora.