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LiterAktiv in Vienna
He was October 2021. The Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church of St Barbara in Vienna, always a powerful centre for organising the Ukrainian diaspora, is undergoing restoration, but in the building next to the church, diaspora members are beginning to gather and hold various events, from joint Bible studies to a chess club and student parties. I'm not a believer, I don't play chess, and I'm far from student parties... I wanted to find something about literature or culture, but I couldn't find anything like that in the schedule of events. So I asked and was told that, apart from me, another Ukrainian woman, Victoria Teliha, was interested in such events - maybe we should cooperate and organise them ourselves?
«LiterAktiv». Victoria Teliha and I agreed on this name after long discussions. We dreamed that LiterAktiv would be the centre of active readers and authors literature. We planned to meet every Wednesday at 19:00. We envisaged different formats: lectures, open mic, creative writing evenings. Sometimes, if we were lucky enough to invite someone, despite the lack of funding, we would have meetings with writers. The first such writer Victoria was able to invite was Myroslav Dochynets, and it was a definite success: a full house, books sold out. However, after Dochynets, for many weeks in a row, we were inventing workshops or lectures without having anyone to invite. Once, I remember, we encouraged everyone to come to a lecture about Olena Teliha, mysteriously promising to tell them whether Victoria Teliha was somehow related to the famous poet (spoiler alert: no).
Later, Viktoriia stepped away from LiterAktiv because it was really hard to do this volunteer project alongside her work and studies.
And when the full-scale war started, we all had no time for LiterAktiv for a while, and the premises near the church turned into a volunteer headquarters for several months, where we brought humanitarian aid and medicines until we found a better place to store them.
And then, in April 2022, when the space became available again, it seemed that literature was out of date, that words were nothing compared to weapons. However, I decided to hold the event in the format of a «free microphone»: everyone could come and read their own or someone else's poem that supported them. Unexpectedly, a lot of people came who I hadn't seen before. And they would read a short poem and then plunge into long and rambling stories about where they were from, how they were, and why the poem they had read helped them. At first, as a moderator, I tried to keep track of time and interrupt, and then I realised that this was probably the first time people dared to talk about pain with the help of literature and you just have to actively to listen. That's how I believed in the idea of LiterAktiv again.
Over time, I found someone who believed in the idea of LiterAktiv with me. This is Khrystyna Kasyanova, who was an active listener at first and then became an even more active curator of LiterAktiv, thanks to whom the project is gradually but surely reaching a new level.
Compared to October 2021, we have grown significantly. We now have our own social media (Facebook, Telegram, Instagram, email newsletter) and logo, and we are working on creating a website and officially registering LiterAktiv as a separate Ukrainian NGO. Due to the full-scale war, many writers (mostly female, not male, for obvious reasons) found themselves abroad, and we were able to invite them to join us. Unfortunately, it's still on a non-paying basis, but we are also working on finding funding. In fact, there are so many presentations with the participation of authors that we now only occasionally hold lectures or workshops - we don't have time: the queue is formed several months in advance, and it happens that we have events not only once but twice a week. We are very grateful to the space of the Ukrainian Library of St Barbara's parish, as well as to the Ukrainian GRND Restaurant and the Ukrainians from the NGO Unlimited Democracy for hosting our events. We are assisted by many photographers who volunteer their time: Anastasia Lavriv, Iryna Karpenko, Valeria Maltseva, Oleksandra Terefenko and others. Ukrainian media write about us. We dream of getting even more coverage, including in the Austrian media.
If we go all out in our dreams, we would like to do three more things:
1) to publish an anthology of texts written by our participants during creative writing evenings;
2) to hold our own literary festival - our partners and colleagues UStream and Hnizdo.Innsbruck have already managed to find additional funds and organise their Ukrainian cultural festivals in Austria, and we feel we can do it too;
3) to organise more bilingual events so that Ukrainian literature can more often come out of its diaspora bubble and become more accessible and understandable to Austrian readers.
LiterAktiv is always actively looking for new authors and partners. If you belong to the former or the latter, please contact us: literaktiv@gmail.com
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