Please join the Ukrainian Studies Program at the Harriman Institute for a lecture by Ieva Gudaitytė. Moderated by Mark Andryczyk.
“They were singing about burning churches and the churches are burning now” (20ft radio host, interview, 2022).
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has exposed the fragility of both material and living memory: destroyed archives and libraries, killed artists, people with indigenous knowledge of the occupied territories cut off from information exchange. Local knowledge and history, especially that of cultural resistance and political dissidence against Tsarist or Soviet occupation, has become a powerful tool for resilience and a way to make sense out of the ongoing terror. Based on fieldwork with independent online music radio communities in Ukraine (20ft Radio and Gasoline Radio), this talk asks how alternative sound media offers ways to listen to the past as an exercise of cultural imagination and citizenship. From the re-releases of the niche 90s new wave and post-punk recordings to podcasts on Ukrainian poetry; rediscovering folklore music tradition; or broadcasting recordings from Donbas jazz festivals, radio stations recontextualize various aural traditions in contemporary popular and electronic music culture, thus offering a physical and virtual space for cultural mobilisation around sound, and a way to reclaim and foster new civic identity. Read through Ana Maria Ochoa Gautier’s notions of aurality; Andryi Portnov and Marianne Hirsch’’s conceptualizations of memory (politics); Maria Sonevytsky’s cultural, and Jennifer J. Carroll’s social ethnographies, this work hopes to add to knowledge on cultural resistance strategies and their legacies through sound media, thus offering new ways to deal with (historical) trauma, symbolic pasts, and uncertain futures.
Ieva Gudaitytė is a PhD candidate at the University of Oslo, with a project investigating the aural politics of alternative sound media communities in Ukraine and their partners across Eastern and Central Europe. Following her previous research and current involvement in the independent community radio scene in the region, her practice operates on the intersection of sound studies and cultural musicology. Her wider practice involves cultural journalism, creative writing, curating, teaching, and various radio work.
