GRANTEE
The Russian war against Ukraine has impacted on all aspects of human life, including the sphere of intangible cultural heritage which includes practices, representations, expressions, knowledge and skills that communities, groups, and, in some cases, individuals, recognize as part of their cultural heritage. We will initiate the documentation and collection via interview of testimonies of war crimes related to intangible cultural heritage; as crimes against cultural heritage as the bedrock of cultural identities, these should be viewed as crimes against humanity, in that they are crimes that impact on the history, ingenuity, and artistic creation of the Ukrainian nation. The project will become a precedent in practice for presenting the destruction wrought by the war on living culture. We will use the methodology of ICH inventorying developed by UNESCO when interviewing. In Ukraine we have already carried out a set of trainings for ICH inventorying, thus the fieldwork (preferably offline) will be executed jointly with a group of prepared ICH experts throughout the regions of Ukraine. We will create a website, and a printable, designed PDF leading, at a later stage, to a book. The project will result in an electronic venue for presenting the lived experience of ICH in an emergency (in this case, the war), where real people (ICH bearers, ICH practitioners, artists, craftsmen, managers, and researchers) will present their experience, emotions, and thoughts regarding Ukraine, ICH and war.