 Hello everyone. Good afternoon. They gave me a hint that we can start, so we will start. My name is Katarina Alemova. Today I'm presenting the House of Europe with my colleague Lina Romanukhova, who will be online. Let's talk about the path... In the past nine months, how we adapted to the situation and how we helped, we will focus on two programs. The first is International Residencies and the second one is Zapravka Initiative, Bostop, together with our colleagues at the Ukrainian Institute and Ukrainian Fund, as well as independent experts who joined our initiative. Just a short agenda, so that you know what to expect, what we started with, what we wanted to talk about, what House of Europe really is, what the scope of the program was until February 2022. Later, war response, this was a program and what kind of changes we needed to implement. We'll talk about the plans for the future, the changes for the nearest future and international residency programs, including the Zapravka Program. What is House of Europe? This is a program funded by the European Union and developed by Goethe Institute, together with the consortium of partners by the British, English, German and Czech organizations. The biggest sector is culture, followed by education, social initiatives, media and work with the youth. A number of programs is very diversified. There are mobility programs, education programs and society development programs, ending up with huge programs like infrastructural grants, translation grants and international grants. In essence, as we started, this is how our perfect outline looked like. The programs with the biggest activity in the sphere of culture and almost within the past three years, this did not happen at all. Accordingly, it all started with the COVID pandemic when all mobility programs, which comprised a huge part of the mobility program, could not be realized. At this moment, this was a test for us how fast we can react to the changing situation. At this moment, new programs came about, such as emergency stipends, a program which was developed within two to three weeks and every single week for five months, we had open calls with over 1,500 stipends in the sphere of professional culture activism. Also, we had Hathathon program. It's not a typo, don't worry. It's derived from the word Hatha, which is home in Ukraine. That was an online event with over 1,000 experts, with IT specialists, who completed over 60 projects within a few days only. They received grants to realize these projects. Thirdly, we had digital cooperation grants. As you know, everything turned digital in the COVID era. We wanted to retain the element of the cooperation of the representatives of Ukrainian cultural activism sphere and Ukrainian representatives. That included digital components. Lastly, Digital Labs is an education grant, which we repeated a few times later. It includes many interactive components with plenty of experts from all around the world and individual mentoring sessions for the participants. You can get funds to realize your own idea. We had such an experience until February 2022, and understandably, the implementation of projects later on required much more effort and much more speed, much better. Within the past seven months, we received support exceeding 1.5 million euros. These funds were transferred to Ukrainians and they were spent in Ukraine, indeed. The first step was the support of the society, providing, for example, first-aid kits, medication and food. Then we had the possibility of repurposing the grants. All grant receivers who have not used all the grants, they could spend the remainder of the money to the articles of first need. For example, in the city of Mariupol, instead of a cinema festival, money was transferred to the relocation. Grants support the society. We transferred the grants to help people on the front line. Some of the money helped people evacuate from the front line. Further on, infrastructure grants, we supported over 30 projects which had to reshape their programs in order to secure their safety and their teams. Moving on, the stipend program, it's individual projects. Within four months after February, I believe it was in the middle of the summer, we started implementing education programs. As we understood this makes sense and we knew how to do it. This is how we returned to online seminars and workshops that we initially planned to perform in spring. House of Europe is a project planned for four years. Quite recently we received the information that this program will be continued. Further projects can change, but in essence this is the way how they will look like. They will be based on the current programs, but they will be supported further on. For example, infrastructure programs. Huge infrastructure programs to rebuild Ukraine will follow. Creative and educational startups will also be supported. Individual support will also be included, including grant projects. Such projects are for alumni. In terms of our capacity building and discourse formats, these projects are aimed at supporting the community. This includes digital labs, hat-a-thon conferences and workshops, and obviously residency programs. Now let's move on to the case of international residencies. This is a picture from this year's residency of Peter Ryask in the city of Urgrod. We are very happy for him. We meant it as a platform to meet the artists from Ukraine and the European Union. Within this time the program has changed. The base part has not changed, but the research component and the educational component were added to this base. First, residencies. Within the past nine months, we started an open call to invite European participants from the European Union. Unfortunately, this did not happen. What we changed, our partners from the EU, Poland, Sweden and Germany offered help to invite Ukrainian artists to their countries. We already had partners who were ready to invite European participants, but in the end the situation looked completely the other way around. We planned to pay out individual funds. We had the possibility of changing the activity and to shell out some funds to emergency needs. However, we implemented the residency in the way it was planned. The digital lab on its part, our residencies, the core participants are managers, curators and researchers. Exactly for these three categories, we performed three programs, including digital laboratories for researchers and art critics. We invited over 15 speakers. We hosted lectures and mentoring sessions. All the participants in the lab received stipends. What was adapted? Firstly, the topics were strictly connected to the situation as is. And the crisis situation as far as... And we adapted as much as we could to what was possible. We added another competition component. This time we decided that the situation is nervous enough so we decided to grant everybody to receive a grant, not to stress them out too much. All the programs were performed really quickly. We sent them video recordings so they could take a look as fast as they can so that they do not lose contact with their education process. But during air raids, they obviously were hiding in the shelters to save their lives. Now I'd like to give the floor to my friend who will talk about the third component, which is more research-based, but Alina will talk more on the subject. This is a collaboration of three main institutions. Excuse me, I have some technical problems. This is a joint program of three institutions, the Foundation of Ukrainian Culture, the Ukrainian Institute, and the DIMM program for Ukraine. This started in 2020. We've been working as a team for two years and I think it's more important for me to join these initiatives. This is a desire for project managers to unite their efforts to develop their capacity in the mystical residence and to talk about the main goals. This is a collaboration of our forces, our research, general landscape of Ukrainian residency to understand the main needs and how we can help to survive in these circumstances. Also, we're working increasingly in visibility of Ukrainian residences. So we try to promote them internationally and also inside the country. And surely we would like to raise the professional standards of people who work in Ukrainian residency and also support each other. Also, we want to create some common mechanism to support Ukrainian residences and it's a question not only inside the country but also internationally. And here you can see briefly our team. So it's Lesvin Gradov. He is now an independent expert and lives now in the USA. Kateryna Limova from the House of Europe, Anastasia Monulyak from the Ukrainian Institute, Yulia Lenina, she is an independent expert, Natalia Karnitskaya, she is from the Ukrainian Culture Foundation and Olya Tykhanov from now an independent expert and living in Austria. And here is a short notice about our activities, what we managed to make. So firstly, we started from mapping of Ukrainian art residency and create Google Map, where you can see active residences and to tell us the truth, some of them were new for me personally and it's nice that at least now we have more information about them and not only on this map but also internationally. We start to cooperate with such organization as trans artists and help for Ukrainian residency to make English language profiles on this database and to be happy that when we started it was only four of them in this database and now it's 20. And also we make online consultations free of charge surely so everyone can write us an email we schedule time and provide our like advice about how you can develop or create your residency. And also we work on newsletter we're trying to share information about different residency opportunities. And very important work in which we are working now it's creation of toolkit because quite often we get questions where can we read like a sort of manual how to create residency in Ukrainian language and we realize that actually that's maybe our task to create such manual toolkit where people can get general information about how to create residency starting from concept till the very end of like reporting for example. And if we talk about researching part of this initiative I will introduce your results of our bar time monitoring of Ukrainian landscape residency. And we use thanks to Alektena Kahidzeher illustrations here and we started this monitoring in May June 20 this year after the full-scale invasion of Russian Ukrainian territory and we boast on in-depth interviews and managed to speak with 12 main organizers in Ukraine from different parts of country and here is like general results of this monitoring surely I think it will be most understandable for you that only 25% of Ukrainian art residency they continue to work and function as artistic tools yes and 33% of this residency they now in hybrid format mostly of them transformed to shelters and sometimes they host even team of these residencies and biggest part of art residency unfortunately stopped to work so they say that we are on hold, on pause and unfortunately they couldn't prolong the activities and here you can see the regional difference which mostly connected surely with attacks zone and you can see that the residency which can survive they situated now in the east of Ukraine but I think it's quite interesting case here it's art Kozeman residency in Ohtyrka some region and this is residency guided by Natalia Ivanova curator of here Milov center and as for me it's example how important like individual human factor in art field especially like in creation saved zone where people cannot only live but also continue to work artistically if we also speak about team with our target group and what we can say now that the biggest part of team works remotely and it's not only like in different cities sometimes even in different countries and surely the main problem which rise now for team of residency it's salary if we talk about target audience it's not change significantly but nevertheless the main difference is that now Ukrainian residency focus mostly on Ukrainian artist understandable because people don't want to take responsibility for life of people other people and specifically for foreign artists and surely target audience now for on artists who suffered the most during the war who lost living spaces and need sometimes very basic things to survive regarding selection criteria and it's also we can say implemented not only in Ukrainian field but also internationally is that almost all selection criteria they started not so important surely it's quite important that person still have professional activity but there are no requests to create some artistic works so it's not demanding and what is interesting also for Ukrainian field that presidency started to accept artist with family spats so I should say that they started to be more inclusive if we talk about problems it's only some of them but surely it's like lack of sustainable support lost of physical space sometimes impossibility to have long term plans sometimes our target audience mentioned that they themselves need psychotherapist help and as I mentioned before it's unwilling to take responsibility for lives of residents and here is a long list of needs and surely most of these needs connected with financial support but also with staff sometimes with needs of archiving works and needs of materials and we all understand that we will face the hard winter time so sometimes it's question of generators etc. to the end on optimistic notes here is the list of residents who managed to survive in this time and also have these artistic activities inside their residences so it's assortment room from Ivanoff from the same region Soryan rooms available from Uzhgorod-Nazar-Vytovich residency it's an inter-Nopil region Napostin and other inter-Nopil as well Baku-Tekreativ-Hapit-Kaminats-Padilsk region Art-Pozaman which I mentioned already in Sumbrijin and Biruchi-Art residency and here is our contact we are open for negotiation for cooperation so if you will have some propositions or ideas we will be very happy to cooperate so thank you very much for attention if you have questions we will be happy to answer them ok have a nice productive conference, goodbye