"How to make an art residency in Ukraine" - Toolkit by Zapravka

Zapravka is an interinstitutional initiative to support art residencies, which was launched in 2020 by the Ukrainian Institute, the Ukrainian Cultural Foundation, and the House of Europe, an EU-funded programme. Their main goals are:  

• Ensuring the visibility and systematic representation of Ukrainian art residencies in the international and local professional sectors
• Raising the professional standards of residency programmes in Ukraine in order to increase their competitiveness in the international art environment
• Informing the Ukrainian and international professional community about opportunities for artists, curators, and other arts and culture professionals

In 2020–2021, in cooperation with DutchCulture | Transartists, Zapravka added 17 profiles of Ukrainian residencies to the Transartists international database, the largest network of art residencies in the world. In 2021, Zapravka published Residencies UA, an online map of art residencies in Ukraine. As of early 2023, it listed 29 locations.

In September 2022, Kyiv was to host the international conference How to Inhabit Instability? organised by Res Artis, one of the largest art residency networks in the world, in cooperation with the IZOLYATSIA Foundation, the Ukrainian Institute, House of Europe, and Goethe-Institut Ukraine. The Zapravka team co-programmed the event,
which was to become the first international art residency forum of such a scale in Ukraine.

Zapravka developed this Toolkit for the conference, and one of the main impulses to create it came from the requests they received from people who wanted to create art residencies but did not know where to start.

Since the Zapravka initiative was created by programme managers of the institutions that supported, among other things, art residencies in Ukraine, they decided that it was their task to create such a knowledge base. In addition to systematising their own professional experience, they conducted a series of in-depth interviews with the organisers of key art residencies in Ukraine, asking them about the most important things in organising a residency, the challenges they faced in their work, and the principal growth areas for Ukrainian residencies. This Toolkit is the result of those conversations.

They started working on this Toolkit in 2021 and created it to be used in (relatively) peaceful times. This does not mean that the Toolkit has lost its relevance after 24 February 2022, as even in the midst of a full-scale war, a number of Ukrainian residencies still host artists, including those from abroad, and some institutions have even launched new residency programmes.

"We are fully aware that the current situation with art residencies in Ukraine is far from perfect, and yet we wrote this Toolkit with best practices in mind. Not because we like to fantasise, but because we believe in victory. And as soon as we’ve won and resumed our cultural activity at full capacity, we want it to be based on principles of care and respect for each participant in this process, as well as for our common environment and all its inhabitants."