In 2016 artist Vova Vorotniov walked more than 1000 kilometers within 35 consecutive days. He was on a mission to bring a piece of coal from his hometown of Chervonohrad, a coal mining center situated at the Western border of Ukraine with Poland, to the town of Lysychansk, in the Eastern region of Donbas, known for its coal-mining industry. The project was titled За/С хід in Ukrainian, its name incorporating three words: West, East and walk. With this gesture the artist desired to establish a link between the West and the East of Ukraine, which had been mentally divided by Russian propaganda. Today, nearly a decade later, both towns are different than they were in very recent history: Lysychansk has been occupied by Russia since 2022, while Chervonohrad is about to be renamed into Sheptytskyi, after a Ukrainian nationalist hero of WWII, as part of the Ukrainian government’s decommunization program. The city was founded in 1692 but the name Chervonohrad was bestowed by the Ukrainian SSR, then a Soviet satellite, in 1951, for the color red (chervonyi).
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Figures 1-3. Vova Vorotniov, Za (s) xid, Chervonohrad—Lysychansk, 2016
Maria Lanko: I would like to talk about walking. What were the beginnings of a conscious practice for you?
Vova Vorotniov: I started conscious walking in the late 1990s to early 2000s when I moved to Kyiv. This wasn’t a bourgeois kind of flâneuring with window shopping, but more of a psychogeographical type of practice, a drift. It was about changing the well-trodden path, going sideways, realizing how your view of the city changes each time. At that time the old Kyiv began to vanish with all the new development projects, so at some point I also started to think about how to “save” the city for myself. With time Kyiv, unfortunately, lost its integrity as a gesamtkunstwerk for me.
And every time I was in a residency in a new city—Vienna, Paris, New York—I would do the same to study the city. Every morning I would take a different metro line, go to the final station and walk all the way back to scan the city and change my perspective on it every day. It was in NYC that I realized that I am able to do 20 to 30 kilometers a day. And when I came back to Ukraine, we went with de ne de initiative to Lysichansk with the Svitlohrad project.
ML: Was it there that you came up with the idea of за с хід?
VV: To be honest, it was kind of a joke at first. Lysychansk is part of the Donbas coal-mining region and I come from Chervonohrad, which is on the other side of the country and less known, but also a coal-mining town. So I just quipped to my curator friends, Zhenya Molyar and Leonid Marushchak, “How about I bring you a piece of coal from here?” For me it was just a nice idea for the notebook of unrealized projects, but they insisted that I should actually do it. So I started preparing myself. I walked every day tracking the distance and time, planned the actual route a couple of months in advance, and when it got warmer, in April, set off.
ML: But this particular project was not about psychogeography or scanning any longer. It was highly conceptual, but had this very important element of performance and endurance.
VV: Right, because I wasn’t aiming at researching space, I had a very precise route and a clear goal: to bring a piece of coal to Lysychansk Local Lore Museum. And this act was to do with the “alchemy” of art, when a lump of coal is transferred from a place where it’s in abundance to another place, which doesn’t have any deficit in coal either. It could have been anything. Why this particular object? Why this very chunk? The alchemy happened when they inventoried it as a museum object, and numbered it in the state museum registry. That particular chunk wasn’t anything special. It was the walking, the performance, the endurance needed for its arrival in Lysychansk, that elevated its value and status. That was a very multi-layered project with so many insights that had not been planned. I only saw them afterwards.
ML: Like what?
VV: The trip was literally a huge space for ethnographic study. I’ve made a lot of field photography collections of typological objects on my ‘carnet de voyage’ Instagram page. Village gates, house decor, WWII monuments, road crosses, landscape variety, traces of the former powers like Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires, etc. Also walking the very long distance, is common, even the norm, seen in a wider historical perspective. We underestimate the great gift we have to be able to walk. I walk, therefore I am. In pedibus veritas.
Figure 4. Vova Vorotniov, Walking in Kyiv, Winter—Spring 2022
ML: When the invasion broke out in Kyiv in February 2022, I left Kyiv with an artwork that we were about to show at the 59th Venice Biennale. But our gallery storage remained there with more than 500 artworks, some of them national heritage pieces. The city was blocked logistically and it was literally impossible to organize evacuation of the works. Proper transport wasn’t enough: there had to be permissions from the City Council and Ministry of Culture, whose administrations were paralyzed. But then I found Leonid Marushchak, who was bringing humanitarian aid in trucks from the West to Kyiv and Kharkiv, and he said he could take some art on the way back and “smuggle” it through numerous checkpoints as he was a well-known volunteer there. But the timing was super difficult—he could come every day for one week, but just for a couple of minutes to load some artworks in small batches, so I needed a person who could perform that task. My whole team and most of my friends were in evacuation, and then I remembered about you. By that time you had moved to another part of the city, like 20 kilometers away from the gallery, but because of your artistic practice I dared to ask you to come help. How was it for you?
VV: It started when I came to my studio on Podil Rybalsky Island on February 24 and realized I would not be able to work in it any longer, since it was almost totally occupied with armed men from the military base nearby. The city was paralyzed, the metro stopped. So I started walking here and there. I started looking for some specific items that someone needed, like a carton of cigarettes for a friend. It was cold and snow stormy later in March, and it reminded me of the atmosphere of the Leningrad blockade, so I was simply wandering.
ML: Was this wandering somehow different from an artistic practice you had had before?
VV: Yes, it was pretty different. I was used to walking, so it wasn’t difficult for me. But I wasn’t doing it for the sake of fitness either. I was looking for some specific goods because the shops were emptied; there were no basic products, so basically I was doing grocery shopping around the city. The atmosphere was like we had rolled back in time fifty, sixty, seventy years. The bridges were barred, lots of checkpoints, the police were checking my phone all the time. Felt like it was WWII. The city became a very restrictive fortress.
ML: And a deserted one…
VV: Right. It’s interesting that in the streets I was mainly stumbling upon people I knew. The mass of citizens had gone, but the main actors, the pedestrians, remained. People who are normally mixed in the crowd, like artists, photographers, suddenly became very visible. The huge city became a small village, wherever you’d go, you’d meet your peers.
Figures 5-6. Vova Vorotniov, Walking in Kyiv, Winter—Spring 2022
ML: You mentioned that your studio became unavailable—how did that change your artistic practice?
VV: I have several types of practice: one is some small drawings, manual easy stuff, and the other is complex museum projects with commentaries. So the latter, complex practice, fell off immediately, since you need a certain amount of space to do such things. Also my subject matter became irrelevant. The invasion has shuffled the deck, my cards are no longer important. To really be able to comment on what’s going on outside your window, you need distance, and quite a bit of cynicism.
ML: And why are your “cards” now unimportant?
VV: Well, if we get back to за с хід for example, Lysychansk is no more: it’s occupied. Chervonohrad is forced to be renamed, so symbolically it will be gone too. In this project I was not trying to sew Ukraine together but rather to walk Ukraine on my feet, to show that different Ukraines can be together. This Ukraine ceased to exist. Ukraine, as we have known it, is gone.
ML: For me, on the contrary, the invasion made the project even stronger.
VV: Right, but the invasion cut it short, historicized it, so to speak. I cannot add any other layers to it, because the contexts–of the country itself, and of my own intentions–have gone. We have a new reality now, so this project can only be addressed from a historical perspective.
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About authors
Maria Lanko is a curator and researcher focusing on the (unwritten) history of Ukrainian contemporary art. She is co-founder of The Naked Room, a space in Kyiv that collaborates with several established artists and/or estates to procure recognition of their early work and archives as well as revisit forgotten or unrealized projects.
Vova Vorotniov (born in 1979 in Červonohrad, USSR) is a Ukrainian multidisciplinary artist. He works with walking practices, psychogeography, photography, ethnography, cultural heritage, sport and vandalism.
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Adair Rounthwaite