Departure, repatriation, duration. Getting confused between words and terms, we increasingly rely on our new experiences. When reflecting on the world culture history, we always deal with the concept of migration as an integral part of our past, which still determines, nonetheless, certain trends of human civilization’s ongoing development. Ukraine has always been one of the most “turbulent” spots on this map. Ukrainians have been migrating and returning throughout the last century: this means that they naturally bring their cultural experience into other national cultures, and the other way around, as a consequence of their comeback to Ukraine. Before 2022, the number of Ukrainians living abroad was estimated to be about 4.9 million according to the UN, and it must have grown at least twice as bigger, as indicated by different sources. This undoubtfully changes the cultural map of our country and that of the world as such, and forms some absolutely new experience of Ukrainian culture, since never in the current century has Europe seen this mass migratory process caused by a war.

Still, we must not forget that migration is also an ornithological term. It’s birds that a Ukrainian artist has much in common with in up-to-date perspective. Dissociation, fragmentation, principle of “peaks” or “archipelagos”, mapping of the Ukrainian culture’s landscape are taking place now in strict keeping with big airports of the world capitals. Warsaw and London are no less important points of contemporary art today than Kharkiv or Lviv. Performances, exhibitions, concerts and residences, as well as possibilities to create and dispose of material resources for that became kind of “southern skies” for Ukrainian artists. Navigation is as complicated in these lands as it is for people displaced within Ukraine. Culture is, in fact, always about environment, which means that accumulated cultural practices can sometimes dramatically modify after the change of residence. It’s also important to appreciate the uniqueness of experiences borne by those who are forming new cultural landscapes of the territories that had been temporarily occupied and those who are returning or still staying in their just relatively safe “nests”.

After analyzing different experiences, one may find it hard to share any success story from a relocated Ukrainian institution. There are some, but it’s a minority of teams that continued with their activities: mainly they changed their optics and lost many of their members. Instead, there are successful cases of the so-called “bird institutions” established by relocated cultural managers who found themselves in isolation from their colleagues. This means that a museum or a library exist in fact but not on the map – like, for example, the UMCA at the Ukrainian House in Kyiv or bus libraries in Odesa.

These are the topics we would like to discuss within the Congress. We think it of the utmost importance to reflect on the future of our culture through the lens of its movements in different directions. Mapping of personal and institutional experiences will be followed by mapping of challenges. Routes of migration, defined at our events, will be focused on returning. Chronicles of pain will intertwine with vitality and hope for a better future for our “Ukrainian birds”.