COURAGE

connecting collections

In 2017 in Leipzig, Artpool was represented at the  “Warsaw Punk Pakt” Punk in Ost-Europa exhibition. Another inspiring cooperative endeavor of the year was the Unearthing The Music international project (UMCSEET – Unearthing The Music Creative Sound and Experimentation Under European Totalitarianism).

In June 2017 the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage decided to create a new public institution: "National Film Archive - Audiovisual Institute" [FINA], formed by joining two previously working bodies: the National Film Archive and the Audiovisual Institute. The aim of the new institution was to collect, catalogue and renovate audiovisual heritage of the Polish culture, as well as produce and disseminate the new forms of audiovisual materials. FINA uses the potential and experience of the two institutions: rich content of the National Film Archive's registry and modern methods of digitalization used in the Audiovisual Institute (established only in 2009).

In September 2015, UMA curator Aniza Kraus attended a conference at the Library of Congress featuring Ukrainian culture. Congresswoman Marci Kaptur was the keynote speaker and one of the presenters was Jaime Monllor, the international outreach officer for the USHMM. At the conference Monllor indicated that one of the Holocaust Museum’s collection goals is documenting non-Jewish victims of persecution by the Nazis and their collaborators, with a particular interest in Ukraine. The UMA invited Monllor to come to Cleveland to see their DP camp collection. He brought three colleagues with him May 2016 to assess the collection. Impressed by what they saw, the USHMM came up with a grant for digitizing Ukrainian DP camp serials, rare published victims’ memoirs and of other related personal paper collections. Phase 1 was completed in February 2017, with support from Archival Data Systems (AIS) based in Kyiv. The parameters of Phase 2 are currently being discussed. Deepening cooperation between the USHMM and the UMA should not only provide scholars with the necessary resources to address understudied dimensions of the Holocaust and mass migration after WWII, it should also provide a more robust framework for understanding the implications of the Soviet-Nazi alliance of 1939 and how that shaped perspectives on and opposition to communism.