A hundred students turn a palace into an installation, and blue poppies wait for spring: GogolFest rewrote its programme

GogolFest is changing the programme of this year's return to Kyiv. The team has given up the main building of the International Centre of Culture and Arts — the former October Palace — and moved to spring every event that would have drawn large crowds.

Festival founder Vlad Troitskyi told Suspilne Kultura about the change the day before.

The festival itself is not being cancelled: it is still due to run on 16–20 September, but now at the Kinopalats cinema. The film screenings and the visual programme stay there, and the Nahirna residency has moved there too.

A decision taken two weeks before the opening

Troitskyi's wording leaves no room for interpretation: he calls it madness to take responsibility for large gatherings of people. The team considered calling the whole thing off, but settled on cutting the mass events and keeping the rest.

The largest of the cuts is the Angels of Freedom project. It was to be staged right in the pit where the Museum of Dignity is to be built: Kyiv Camerata, the Kyiv choir, Mariana Holovko with projections onto trees and special screens, and a large installation by a Polish artist — a hundred blue poppies in the pit itself.

"I understand that gathering two or three thousand people so they can watch Kyiv Camerata play and the Kyiv choir sing… We cannot give ourselves the right to ignore that red flag and say: 'We are doing this,'" Vlad Troitskyi told Suspilne Kultura.

The big events with Dakh Daughters, DakhaBrakha and the band Schmalgauzen have moved to spring as well — the acts closest to home for the festival: Troitskyi is their artistic director, and all of this grew out of the Dakh theatre.

What is left has been arranged so that no crowd gathers in one spot. On Saturday around a hundred students of the arts lyceum, run by the artist Alevtina Kakhidze, will set about turning the palace into one continuous art object: the idea is that every room and every staircase becomes a separate installation. On Sunday crews begin mounting a piece by Nikita Kadan, made specially for the festival.

Twenty years and eight cities

Troitskyi explains the decision not to cancel everything by a responsibility that runs the other way: people need to see that life goes on. He holds both halves of that thought at once — the hope and the caution.

Over twenty years GogolFest has been held twenty-eight times in eight Ukrainian cities and four European countries, and more than eight hundred thousand people have attended it. It began at the Mystetskyi Arsenal art centre in Kyiv, then came the VDNH exhibition grounds and the Dovzhenko Centre film archive, and from 2018 the festival took to the road — Mariupol, Vinnytsia, Dnipro, Kherson. In 2019 it was named one of the five best festivals in Europe at the EFFE Awards.

Before the opening the team will put the grounds in order once more: a community clean-up day was already held there in August, and another is planned for just before the festival.

Earlier we wrote about how Kyiv's Brave! Factory has been filling a depot with a rave for the seventh year running — another answer from the Ukrainian scene to the same circumstances.