Nov. 13, 6.30 pm

Lecture

Oleksiy Radynski
«Cacophony of Donbas»

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The talk is based on the research for a documentary film «Cacophony of Donbas», dealing with various implications of an armed conflict in the Ukrainian coal ­mining region of Donbas that started in Spring 2014. Referring to Dziga Vertov’s classic «Symphony of the Donbass» (1930), this research looks at the Donbas war as a counter-modernist endeavor that should be regarded in the context of fundamentalist responses to global imperialism. Unlike the revolutions of the past that were focused on the idea of the future, the crucial issue in the Donbas revolt is history. The war in Donbas was ignited by historical reconstructors and geeks, and it is in a certain sense an attempt to replay the clashes and antagonisms of the past. The research is based on traces of the media environment that emerged in the context of the Russian-Ukrainian war, an environment that is in itself an active agent of current hostilities.