Future of the Fellowship: A Conversation With Co-Founder Volodymyr Burkovets

At the start of summer 2024, Volodymyr Burkovets, co-founder of the initiative, volunteered to serve in the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Nearly six months later, we had a brief phone call with Volodymyr about the future of the Antonin Artaud Fellowship: where we’re headed, what we hope to achieve, and what we dream about.

When Olga Diatel, Illia Razumeiko, and I first launched the initiative, we set a key criterion: it had to be “a long game.” Our vision was for the Fellowship to last at least 40 years 🙂. But it’s also about ensuring that each work-in-progress, developed within the Fellowship, could be scaled and presented internationally. It’s about creating broader international cooperation, presentations, exchanges, and networking opportunities that allow our European artistic vocabulary and understanding of art history, of artistic movements, to resonate globally. This year, several Fellowship fellows were able to present their works at foreign festivals – unfortunately, I couldn’t attend any of them, as I was already serving.

This kind of synchronization needs a feedback loop. I’d like to see the Fellowship continue encouraging artists working abroad to present their work in Ukraine. It’s crucial that what we show the world is mirrored back to us. We must make our international connections reciprocal. Personally, I dream of a performance art festival.

What I’ve come to realize with time is that a community has already formed around the Fellowship. These are people who met at our events, workshops, and presentations. This is incredibly important, but it also raises a question: how do we maintain the momentum of this community? Any community tends to become closed off: around particular people, around a certain style. How can we avoid turning into a “closed circle” while continuing to expand the community’s horizons?

 
Volodymyr Burkovets at the team meeting in 2023. Photo by Herman Kryger

When thinking about the future of the Fellowship, I’d like each new round to be focused on a specific genre or dedicated to a particular theme—a more thematic or genre-based approach. This is what we did, for instance, with the southern edition of the Fellowship, when we supported artists from Odesa, Mykolaiv, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia. Olia and I are definitely dreaming of an edition dedicated to circus artists.

And without question, one of our big goals is to have our own space. A place where artists can develop their works-in-progress, run workshops and educational events, and rehearse under conditions designed for experimentation. That kind of environment would allow the Fellowship to become a more sustainable project.

I dream of a future where we support artists in creating new works, but also one where we build a long-term platform for experimentation and cultural dialogue between Ukraine and the world. A space for working together, preserving openness and expanding the community, while also supporting international exchange: that’s the future of the Fellowship as I see it.

The translation of this material was made possible through the Per Forma grant program, implemented by the Kyiv Contemporary Music Days platform with the support of the Performing Arts Fund NL and the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science of the Netherlands, aimed at developing the performing arts sector in Ukraine.

Translation by Yurii Popovych