Kinography
The map of cinemas
Website
Don’t Leave the Room
Kinography is a project that researches and maps the past and present of Ukrainian communal cinemas, primarily focusing on the cinemas built during the Soviet cinemafication of the 1940-1980s.
It started with Ksenia Rybak’s and Olena Syrbu’s report Don’t Leave the Room researching why over half of the Soviet communal cinemas of Kyiv have disappeared since 1991. Due to legal or illegal privatization, lack of budget, or simple neglect. Nowadays, the group of nine researchers tracks the further history of those cinemas and speculates on what awaits them in modern-day Ukraine.
Kinography has created – as the organizers define it – a spontaneous archive of modernist cinemas from fourteen Ukrainian cities. The archive documents the [former] location of the cinema, the year of construction, the architectural style, its current condition and legal condition. The archive is open for everyone to contribute.
The openness of the archive comes from its activist origin and participatory approach. The idea of Kinematography was born from protests, and for this reason Kinography’s practices of archiving, mapping and analyzing data make it closer to an amateur archive than to an academic, institutional research.
Kinography sees these cinemas as a complex unit intertwined with culture, architecture, art, history and urban life. Spreading this view is the primary goal of the research project. Kinography hopes to help form an image of cinemas as cultural institutions that inevitably affect the life of urban communities by connecting them to art.
The openness of the archive comes from its activist origin and participatory approach. The idea of Kinematography was born from protests, and for this reason Kinography’s practices of archiving, mapping and analyzing data make it closer to an amateur archive than to an academic, institutional research.
Kinography sees these cinemas as a complex unit intertwined with culture, architecture, art, history and urban life. Spreading this view is the primary goal of the research project. Kinography hopes to help form an image of cinemas as cultural institutions that inevitably affect the life of urban communities by connecting them to art.
