Fundacja Floating EKA

Project: Sąsiedzi.Сусіди.Суседзі.Соседи. (The Neighbours)

The Sąsiedzi.Сусіди.Суседзі.Соседи project brings together theatre groups from Ukraine, Poland, Belarus, and Russia to explore neighbourly relationships through documentary theatre. The four performances, based on personal stories of war witnesses, will focus on themes such as fleeing war, defending borders, resisting dictatorship, and anti-war stance. The aim is to reflect on collective trauma, encourage dialogue, and confront division.The project leader, the Floating EKA, was established in November 2020 by a team of artists, curators and producers from Poland, Ukraine, Belarus and Russia to collaborate beyond the borders and contribute to social cohesion and environmental citizenship in order to build a peaceful, creative, and sustainable region.We spoke to the Floating EKA team about their project.

Four neighbours 

“The idea of a theatre project called Sąsiedzi.Сусіди.Суседзі.Соседи (Neighbours) was inspired by the events happening in Belarus in 2020-2021,” they tell us. “Because of the political repressions many people left Belarus and became political refugees. Initially we thought the documentary basis for the play about the neighbours would be the talks of forcibly displaced persons, political refugees and labour migrants, who ended up in Poland and Ukraine.”“Because of the tragic events that unfolded on the 24th of February, we took a decision to unite creative teams from four countries — Ukraine, Poland, Belarus and Russia — and with the means of the documentary theatre talk about what does it mean to be neighbours when the war and political repressions affect our lives.”

The teams 

The project involves four teams each consisting of a director and playwright. These teams gather documentary material to write plays on chosen topics related to neighbourhood relations in Ukraine, Poland, Belarus, and Russia.

Sąsiedzi.Сусіди.Суседзі.Соседи will showcase four documentary theatre performances, each presented in a different location. The Polish play, Najem okazjonalny, will premiere on 27th February 2022 in Autorski Ośrodek Teatralny, Szczecin, Poland; the Ukrainian play, ЛЮТИЙ, will premiere in Kyiv; the Belarussian play, Суседкi Марыi, will premiere at the European Humanities University in Vilnus, Lithuania; the Russian play will premier online. Dates for the latter three performances are yet to be confirmed.

The Polish team is represented by Weronika Fibich and Kaciaryna Bycak from the Ośrodek Teatralny Kana. Fibich is an anti-disciplinary artist and Bycak is a student of religious studies. The Russian team is represented by Anastasia Patlai and Nana Grinstein from Teatr.doc, who are both involved in documentary theatre plays. The Belarusian team is represented by Maria Bershadskaya, a screenwriter and dramaturg who has written about human rights violations in Belarus. The Ukrainian team’s representation is confirmed, but the participants will be announced later for security reasons. 

The performances 

The Ukrainian play ЛЮТИЙ (Luty) explores the importance of understanding neighbours and the role it could have played in preventing Russian aggression. The play features stories of a Polish volunteer, Ukrainian journalist, and Belarusian who chose to fight for Ukraine and addresses the question of why neighbours would attack each other. The name ‘Luty’ means ‘February’ and is the same in Ukrainian, Polish, and Belarusian.

Najem okazjonalny (The Occasional Rent), staged by the Polish team, is about neighbourhoods and forced displacement. The documented stories of the Ukrainians who escaped the war and ended up in Poland serve as the starting ground for the play. The performance will be played not on the stage, but on the staircase in one of the houses in Szczecin.

Суседкi Марыi (Maria’s neighbours) highlights the importance of local chats in providing essential information during the Belarusian protests in 2020, helping many avoid arrest. The chat members, once neighbours, now live in different countries but remain united and supported. The play showcases how the chat continues to bring them together despite repression and displacement caused by the protests and Russian attack on Ukraine.

The Russian team created a performance about neighbours from a small town who became enemies and started reporting each other to the police. The protagonist of the story is Tatyana Novikova, a linguist and a professor at the University of Belgorod, who was fined and fired for the anti-war position. The title of the performance is under development.

Art’s role in working through trauma

How can we talk about trauma while the situation is still unfolding? Issues such as who has the right to talk about the trauma and how to talk about it must be considered, as well as whether it is worth talking about it now or waiting until the war is over. The project is prompts us to start thinking answers for these questions, even if answers remain ambivalent and varied. It also asks: how did we end up here? And could we prevent it from happening?

The project fabulates strategies to give expression to and work through trauma: “Firstly, by gathering testimonies we give the respondents a chance to speak up and share their experience that might otherwise stay untold and unheard for various reasons. As it is happening with the Ukrainian team, the director and the playwright are working with the accounts of a team of volunteers from different countries who chose to fight for Ukraine.”

“The project we are working on now should help us in future to avoid such a thing as asymmetric memory recall, which happens often because of mutual silence but it is possible to overcome it by creating an inclusive memory that allows to speak about the suffering of all the parties. Maybe one day it will help us find a way to reconcile, though we are not talking about reconciliation now, we are talking about trying to hear each other and acknowledge each other’s suffering which will hopefully help us deal with the catastrophic and total division.”

A culture of solidarity

“When we talk about the culture of solidarity in 2023, it is crucial to remember that the real basis for our personal freedom and the freedom of our societies should be equality and love for one’s neighbours,” says the Floating EKA. “The events we are witnessing in the recent years prove (and it is especially obvious now) that the independence of individual countries and the freedom of individual opinion leaders and the most active participants of the political events are not enough to automatically create interpersonal solidarity.”

“Without trying to understand the Other person, without empathy and acceptance of the other individual, the culture of solidarity is impossible. Our project is an attempt to understand and get to know each other. Creators from different countries involved in the war between Russia and Ukraine get equal opportunities to speak up. We are trying to understand those who fight for other countries too, those who have spent several years in underground resistance and those who believed in peaceful resistance, those who became an enemy for their own city because they were against the war.”

“This work is helping us to look not only at the events, but inside ourselves too. To understand the Other person we have to let them through ourselves. We are convinced that the basis of the culture of solidarity are empathy, co-creation, cooperation and compassion to one another.”

“PS: What inspires us”

The Floating EKA team shared with us some other projects that also inspire their work. The Borderland Foundation the International Centre for Dialogue in Krasnogruda (Poland), is a cultural centre on the Lithuania-Russia that promotes diversity by working with minorities and operates in regions with traumatic memories and old conflicts to promote unity.

The Ethnography and School History Museum in Visaginas Municipality (Lithuania), addresses heritage and identity through speaking to people who remember the town’s creation, recording their testimonies and portraits to showcase their stories, while tackling the differing views of honoring the nuclear power plant workers by the older and younger generations.

The International Coalition of Cultural Workers in Solidarity with Ukraine, antiwarcoaltion.art, is an open online platform that gathers anti-war statements by artists worldwide, created by cultural workers from Belarus who fled the country due to political disagreements.

The theatre festival called Ubumuntu Arts Festival, established in 2015, which confront the consequences of the genocide in Rwanda, now attracts artists globally and uses art as a means of reconciliation when dialogue is no longer feasible.

Granted: €31,610