Join us for Industrial Dreams, a workshop exploring industry, archive, war, erasure, and community resilience.

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What is it like to live with a past that most people would prefer to forget? How do we dream, resist, and create in industrial places? Can we reach out to the past, to archival materials, and other generations, and take the narrative into our own hands?

This one-day festival will bring together artists, film makers, archivists and people fleeing conflict to look at how the histories and experiences from industrial areas in the Ukrainian East and South Wales intertwine.

In this workshop, we will explore the ways that the industrial legacies of these places, and other industrialized regions in the UK and Ukraine, are entangled and how they speak to each other through the archive. We will bring together archival documentation of the steelworks, including records of their demise and utopian projects for the post-industrial future (e.g. the Ebbw Vale Garden Festival), with contemporary art from Wales and Ukraine that responds to the post-industrial condition in various ways, from mourning to humour and resistance.

Our workshop will culminate with the UK premiere of EURODONBAS, a documentary film exploring the historic links between industrial communities in Europe and the Ukrainian East, and the local communities in Ukraine exploring these links before Russia’s full-scale invasion of February 2022. The film also addresses the history of Welsh labour migration to Hughesovka (today’s Donetsk) at the end of the nineteenth century. We will be joined by the film’s director Kornyi Gricyuk and producer Olena Kirichek for a discussion and Q&A after the film.

Join us for part or all of this exciting event!

This workshop is realised with the support of the Art and Humanities Research Council in partnership with the University of St Andrews, EVI, and Gwent Archives.

Schedule for the day:

3pm Welcome and Introduction – Main Hall

3.10 Archival workshop – Main Hall – Whatever happened to Gryff? The industrial imaginary in Ebbw Vale and Azovstal. Centre for Urban History of East Central Europe, Lviv; Ebbw Vale Works Archive; Gwent Archives

4pm Break – Cafe (free Ukrainian-style drinks and snacks will be served)

4.10 Film Screening – Main Hall – ‘Life Beyond the CV’ introduced by Freefilmers, a filmmaking collective formerly based in Mariupol (now displaced to Zaporizhzhia)

4.30 Practical workshop – Main Hall – Engaging the archive & community re-photography

5:30 Break – Cafe (free Welsh and Ukrainian-style drinks and snacks will be served)

6pm Film Screening – Main Hall – UK Premiere of ‘EuroDonbas’ documentary. Introduced and discussed by producer Olena Kirichek & director Kornyi Gricyuk

8:00 END

Image: Oleksandr Kuchynskyi, from the series “De-industry?” produced using archival photographs by Pavlo Kashkel from the Mariupol Local History Museum.