The #ScienceForUkraine Initiative
Report 2022–2024
Immediately after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, February 24, 2022, on March 1st, the Department launched a call for fellowships to support scholars at risk from Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus. The day after, on March 2nd, Weddigen held a Spring Term Opening Lecture on the looting of art that occurred in Germany on Stalin’s directives to highlight possible political continuities. The #ScienceForUkraine Fellowships, named after the international coordination initiative, were funded by the President upon application, and renewed the year after (329k EUR). The Getty Foundation, Los Angeles, offered funding upon application to support another 14 art historians, who had not left Ukraine, with one-time on-site grants (70k EUR), to which the Department added another four; all grantees presented their research online in the Workshop (Dis)Continuities: Navigating Through the History of Ukrainian Art. The topics of this research ranged from Byzantine to contemporary art and architecture.
Fellows’ Projects
Five female Ukrainian scholars and three male Russian scholars joined the Department with research projects ranging from early modern to contemporary art. Thanks to the Institute’s Public Relations, the Department produced the video documentary Supporting Scholars at Risk, which spotlights the #ScienceForUkraine Fellows, their research, and personal experience. Special thanks go to the institute’s administration and the departmental Scientific Assistants for supporting the difficult logistics in hosting and welcoming the scholars and their families (the ones who managed get to Rome; not all were successful in this regard). There is similarly a need to acknowledge the generous hospitality supplied by the foreign academies in Rome as members of the Unione internazionale. The research projects of the #ScienceForUkraine Fellows included neo-Byzantine mural painting in Ukraine, the oeuvre of the Italo-Russian Vincenzo Brenna around 1800, post-war West-German art museum architecture, contemporary art’s reception of Soviet Ukrainian cultural heritage, the postwar documentary photography of Iryna Pap, archival practices in contemporary photography, contemporary counterfactual art practices, and the present images of war and war of images.
Scholarly Activities
The Fellows and Scientific Assistants launched an impressive number of initiatives to raise awareness for Ukrainian and Eastern European art and architectural history across times: the online exhibition Describing Ukraine: Cartography and Travelogues of digitized and described publications on Ukraine held by the Library; Ukrainian art performances hosted by the Swiss Institute; a Workshop on Images of War / War of Images; the European Pavilion, including performances and the Workshop The Voices, Sounds, and Images of Europe; the Research Seminar series Shifting Images and Ideas of Europe’s East: An Art Historical Approach from the Margins, and other Research, Film, and Field Seminars exploring the politicization of Byzantine heritage in Ukraine, the Futurist legacy of Russian propaganda, anti-regime monuments in Belarus, images of Russia in early modern European literature, the embodiment of Eastern Europe, Eastern Feminism after 1989, Georgian medieval studies under Soviet rulership, Italian relations with Lithuania in the Seicento, the Orientalizing of Poland, art of dissent in Ukraine, and the role of generative AI in the war of images. The Department, expanding its scholarly horizon, organized one Field Seminar in Tirana (Albania), Prishtina (Kosovo), and Skopje (North Macedonia), and another in Helsinki (Finland), Tallin (Estonia), Riga (Latvia), and Vilnius (Lithuania). Moreover, Oleksandra Osadcha curated the Research Exhibition Hidden / CXOBAHE by the photographer Elena Subach, whose work documents the efforts undertaken to preserve Ukrainian cultural heritage at the onset of war.
Outlook
While the Department’s initiative has run out of funding and most of #ScienceForUkraine Fellows have found fellowships and temporary opportunities across Europe, the Department is exploring ways to support scholars affected by the war, such as co-organizing a summer academy in Ukraine in 2025.
