Every Dog is a Lion in its Home

Personal geographies of place, identity and belonging within London’s Ukrainian communities

A participatory mapping project by Livingmaps Network together with Pushkin House

Background

There is a Ukrainian saying: ‘Every dog is a lion in its own home’. Both the armed forces and civilian population of the Ukraine have lived up to this proverb in their response to the brutal invasion by Putin’s war machine. Under these conditions, the sense of home and belonging becomes a collective experience; it embraces not just where you live, your personal space and immediate neighbourhood, but your town or city and the country as a whole, which becomes, in a very material sense, your homeland.

This is a war which is both intensely local and global in its geopolitical implications. So many thousands of personal tragedies, each an incremental index of a war crime which demands international justice, but which requires the minute mapping and sifting of evidence on the ground: an archaeology of small things tracing an enormous violation of human rights. Meanwhile, for those who have been forced to flee for their lives, and are now engaged in tortuous and often hazardous journeys to relative safety, it is vital that they cling on to whatever possessions and images they have managed to salvage from the wreckage. These portable homing devices constitute living maps which will be critical in enabling them to deal with the trauma of having the front lines of war smash into their back yards.

At the same time, for the hundreds of thousands who form the long-established Ukrainian diaspora spread across Europe (including the UK) and who often still have family and friends in the combat zones, this is an agonising moment. They watch from afar the scenes of devastation portrayed on social media or on the TV, in which places they knew and loved have become unrecognisable ruins; they look at the maps which display the disposition of the Russian forces without for a moment dispelling the fog of war on the ground, and try to reconcile them with lived memories of their homeland.

These mediated images, however sympathetic in intent, tend only to show Ukrainians as victims or heroes of the war. Inevitably, they ignore the dense textures of everyday life which invest particular homes, streets, buildings, neighbourhoods, gardens and fields with both personal and shared meaning and which constitute vivid and enduring memoryscapes, both for those who remain and those who are forced to leave. At the same time, the Ukrainian diasporic community has created its own homes from home, and this rich social and cultural ecology needs to be mapped as an important source of information and orientation for new arrivals.

In this project, we will address both of these dimensions through a programme of workshops and linked activities.

Project Summary

The Livingmaps team will work with groups of Ukrainians now established in London, both adults and children. The aim is to provide a platform from which participants can use a variety of media to co-create a space and form of collective representation of their situation, which is also of benefit to new arrivals. The work produced will be hosted on the Livingmaps website so that is available to the wider public, as well as being disseminated through Ukrainian community organisations.

Workshop One: Homing Devices

An adult group attending a Ukrainian community support network based in South London will create a multi-modal mapwork drawing on their experiences of making a new home for themselves in different parts of London. In a second session, the group will explore their memoryscapes of growing up and living in Ukraine. The two sessions will last 2–3 hours each with a break. The two mapworks will be used to introduce those newly arrived in London to already-established Ukrainian communities and to help develop links between the two groups.

Workshop Two: Travelling Stories

A children’s group from St Mary’s Ukrainian Saturday School in West London will take part in a puppet making and storytelling project, drawing on themes of journeying, home making and displacement from popular Ukrainian folk tales to co-create a play to be performed at Easter. The ten sessions will last 45 minutes each.

Workshop Three: Trails, Tracks and Traces

This workshop is designed to explore creative mapmaking in the city, finding ways to chart personal landmarks and map experiences of sights, sounds, smells, textures and memories of place. It will take place in three sessions at Pushkin House, a cultural centre supporting refugees from both Russia and Ukraine located in Central London. Participants will be recruited from adults involved in the other workshops who are interested in developing their creative skills to add more layers of information to their map making.

All workshop participants will be offered refreshments, and those taking part in Workshop Three will receive travel expenses into Central London.

This project is kindly supported by the Diana Whitworth CAF Trust.

APPENDIX ONE: THE DELIVERY TEAM

Organisations

The Livingmaps Network is a not-for-profit social enterprise founded in 2015 by a group of academics, artists and activists. In the last few years it has grown into an international centre for the theory and practice of critical cartography with a focus on participatory community mapping. LMN produces a bi-annual online journal and a programme of lectures, webinars and workshops plus an annual counter-mapping festival. Recent community based projects include The Groundbreakers, an immersive trail and guide to the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, telling the site’s back story from the Bronze Age to the Digital Age.

Pushkin House is an independent cultural centre established in London in 1954 during the Cold War by a group of scholars with Russian roots. A venue offering a varied programme of events, exhibitions and community initiatives, the House is a platform for initiating active enquiry, critical debate and democratic exchange across cultures.

Project Management and Evaluation

Phil Cohen is an Emeritus Professor at the University of East London and the founder and research director of the Livingmaps Network. In the 1990s he began using participatory mapping in his ethnographic research and educational work with young people in the East End of London. He is the author of many books based on this research, including the widely acclaimed study On the Wrong Side of the Tracks: East London and the Post-Olympic City (Lawrence and Wishart, 2013). He has also published a memoir, fiction and poetry. His most recent book is Things Ain’t What They Used To Be: Notebooks from a Once and Future Time (eyeglass books, 2022). He is currently co-ordinating the development of the Young Citizens Atlas for Livingmaps.

Workshop Leaders

Natalia Baryshovets comes from a musical background and attended a music academy in Ukraine for seven years. She came to the UK in 2009 and went on to study an MBA at the University of Wales, graduating with distinction. In 2014 she changed direction and began to work as a children’s tutor and entertainer, mostly for the Ukrainian communities in London. After having her first child in December 2020, she created her own puppet theatre on wheels and started to combine it with children’s entertainment and other events. Most recently, she has been organising puppet making workshops with a variety of Ukrainian children’s groups.

Debbie Kent makes work around walking, sound and the city. She is half of a collaboration called The Demolition Project (with Russian artist Alisa Oleva), which has made site-responsive walks and works for festivals and galleries in Ekaterinburg, Moscow, Krasnodar, Vilnius, Berlin, Belgrade, London, Leicester, Manchester and Leeds. She is researching the soundscapes of regeneration in Blackwall and Silvertown for a PhD at Goldsmiths and is a member of the Livingmaps team working on the Young Citizens Atlas of London.

Jina Lee is an artist and researcher currently studying a PhD at the University of Arts London. She has been working with immigrants and foreign labourers in London to find hidden stories in relation to geopolitical and cultural boundary issues. She is one of the directors of the Livingmaps Network and has contributed articles to its journal as well as a chapter about her work in an anthology of this material, New Directions in Radical Cartography (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022).

Alisa Oleva holds a BA and MA from the Courtauld Institute of Art and an MA in Performance from Goldsmiths. She is based in London. ​Alisa treats the city as her studio and urban life as material, considering issues of urban choreography and urban archaeology, traces and surfaces, borders and inventories, intervals and silences, passages and cracks. Her projects have manifested as a series of interactive situations, performances, movements, scores, personal and intimate encounters, parkour, walkshops and audio walks. She works at Pushkin House as their Community Outreach Curator.

APPENDIX TWO: WORKSHOP PROGRAMMES

Workshop One: Homing Devices

Specification: Two three-hour participatory mapping workshops for adults 18+

Location: Holy Trinity Brompton Onslow ’Love Ukraine Project’

Workshop Leader: Jina Lee

Summary

Through this workshop, participants will identify and describe the places in London which they frequent and use. Is there a recommendable market where you usually shop, where people can easily access Ukrainian ingredients or substitutes? Do you have a favourite park or playground for children that you would like to share? Do you know any hospitals or pharmacies for Ukrainian speakers? Are there any places or areas people should avoid going? Can these places be translated into somewhere in Ukraine, so people can understand more easily? In addressing these questions, participants build up a multi-layered map of the social ecology of the diasporic Ukrainian community, which can serve as a guide to new arrivals.

A second workshop session will focus on collecting Ukrainian diasporic stories, including associations with childhood memoryscapes and with the places which have come to be regarded as homes from home in London.

These two mapworks will provide a valuable visual representation of what it means to be a Ukrainian living in London at the present time. They will provide a valuable resource to document homing devices and strengthen community cohesion by providing a link between the already-established and new arrivals from Ukraine.

Workshop Two: Travelling Stories

Location: St Mary’s Ukrainian School, Wilberforce Primary School, Beethoven Street, London, W10 4LB

Specification: Ten weekly Saturday workshops of 45 minutes each for 10 primary-age children aged 6–10 years old

Workshop Leader: Natalia Baryshovets

Draft timetable

WORKSHOP THREE: Trails, Tracks and Traces

Specification: Three monthly workshops for participants aged 18+ each lasting 2–3 hours 

Location: Pushkin House, London WC1A 2TA

Workshop leaders: Debbie Kent and Alisa Oleva

Participants will be invited to:

• think about how we make mental maps of spaces 

• learn and explore ways to do so

• heighten awareness of place through sensory and observation exercises

• find and share personal meanings within a place 

• share ways of making routes and maps

• reflect on observations of our work

Output

A group-produced map or set of maps made up of drawings, notes, photos and perhaps sound recordings, which can be displayed online or in an exhibition, plus documentation of the process that can be turned into a DIY toolkit for other workshops or for self-directed place exploration. 

Input from participants

No special skill or experience is necessary. We will supply some basic materials, there is no requirement for participants to bring anything. We can accommodate access requirements by adjusting the scope of the area explored.

Format

Each workshop has a different theme, and all of them can be taken together, or participants can take one or two in isolation. Each one is centred on practical exercises including walking, writing and drawing (notebooks and pens/pencils provided), but we will also talk about and look at examples of artists, maps and urban walking practices. There will be an opportunity for participants to record sound and take photographs of their own, but this will not be essential.  

Workshop 1: Sensory maps

Warm-up exercise on tuning into the senses; walk in a group and individually in the local area using listening, touch, smell and sight; make individual and group maps of our walks. Discussion and review of what we’ve done. 

Workshop 2: Personal landmarks

Warm-up exercise on inventorying space; critical introduction to how landmarks are chosen and shown on tourist and commercial maps; techniques to record personal landmarks as a word-map, as poetry or storytelling; sharing of the work with each other.

Workshop 3: Memory maps

Warm-up exercise on retracing personal routes; narrating remembered routes in the present tense; using cut-up techniques to remake a map as a personal record; sharing and discussion.