HeritEDGE: Digital Archiving and Research

The Center for Urban History and the Dnipro Center for Contemporary Culture launched a joint project, "HeritEDGE: Digital Archiving and Research" in cooperation and support of St. Andrews University.  

The project is based on an interdisciplinary methodology that draws on critical heritage studies, decolonial studies, related humanities disciplines, and engagement practices. The aim is to develop a practice of archival work that is not just about preserving a record of the past, but about reckoning with this record’s discriminatory biases, limitations and failures, and striving towards more ethical and inclusive heritage preservation practices. Particularly in the context of war and within the landscape of devastation, when many museums, and archives have been destroyed, looted or displaced, resulting in extreme heritage precarity.

During the "HeritEDGE: Digital Archiving and Researching" project, the team of curators, researchers, and artists will work on creation of new digital collections of urban life from the of the endangered territories of Ukraine that will be used in museum work, education, and cultural activism. The digital collections will be produced using innovative crowdsourcing and community archiving methods developed through the award-winning "Un/archiving Post/industry" project (European Heritage Award 2023), and will form the basis for the production of professional resources supporting institutional and grassroots preservation work in and around the endangered or occupied regions; the generation of educational resources; public program as a part of [unarchiving] series of the Center for Urban History and the delivery of community archiving workshops in partnership with Dnipro Center for Contemporary Culture engaging local communities in Dnipro.

Moreover, the project is building thematically a dialogue with another project "The Worker Portrait in the Twentieth Century: Archives and Artistic Reflection," supported by the British Council. It brings into dialogue two large archival collections dedicated to the documentation of industry and working-class life in UK, Ukraine and the Soviet Union: the collection of the Soviet Ukrainian industrial photographer Mykola Bilokon (partially available here) and the “Soviet Women” collection of the British feminist social documentary photographer, Franki Raffles (parts of which can be viewed here). The project will be led by the Pokrovsk Local History Museum, in collaboration with the University of St. Andrews, the Dnipro Center for Contemporary Culture, and Center for Urban History in Lviv. The project will work through complex sociocultural legacies, including deindustrialization and decline of industrial cities, the Soviet social project and totalitarian ideology, the erasure of working-class culture and heritage, and the role of the industrial past in imaginings of the post-industrial, post-war future. Bringing together archivists, artists, and researchers, the project will result in an exhibition in October 2025 and a number of online and offline activities that will shed new light on both collections. 

The project will be implemented within the framework of "HeritEDGE: Supporting archival resilience and heritage futures in Ukraine" supported by the St. Andrews University.

Credits

Cover Image: still frame from a digitized film by the "Volnytsia" national film studio / Urban Media Archive of the Center for Urban History