By World Voices Central & Jap Europe
By Ihor Kruchyk
This story is a part of a collection of essays written by Ukrainian artists entitled “Regained Tradition: Ukrainian voices curate Ukrainian tradition.” This collection is produced in collaboration with the Folkowisko Affiliation/Rozstaje.artwork, due to co-financing by the governments of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia by means of a grant by the Worldwide Visegrad Fund. The mission of the fund is to advance concepts for sustainable regional cooperation in Central Europe. It has been translated from Ukrainian by Iryna Tiper and Filip Noubel.
For many who find yourself behind bars, the notion of the world modifications. Time slows down. Area is restricted by a fringe of barbed wire. However nobody needs to steer their life as cattle on a farm. And thus creativity awakens in lots of.
Pavlo Selezen, a local of Chernihiv in northern Ukraine, served his sentence in correctional colony No. 116 within the metropolis of Sumy. “Sashko Gres served his time period with me. He knew how one can make knives,” says Selezen.
Knives have been made within the work space of the jail below the supervision of guards. Nothing might be introduced again from that house into the residing areas of the jail. Prisoners made many issues within the colony: backgammon and chess video games, packing containers, icons, rosaries, cigarette holders, and pipes for smoking tobacco and hemp. The imprisoned males channeled their creativity into the work, and all of it was aesthetically interesting.
Typically, jail employees commissioned objects.“As soon as a senior officer of the colony introduced Gres a Cossack saber, and requested him: “Are you able to make one like this?” recollects Selezen. “They have been getting ready a present for a basic.” Gres was supplied with meals, tea, and cigarettes. Inside per week, he made an actual copy of the saber from a automobile spring.
And the way are prayer beads made? “The blokes melted colourful balls from extraordinary plastic bottles on a lamp. Then they pierced a gap in them with a needle, and aligned the balls on a string — and that’s the way you make a rosary.” The costliest rosaries are fabricated from ivory. The place did they get it? They sawed billiard balls in half. However often, the fabric used was extra inexpensive. “Once I was nonetheless within the Chernihiv pre-trial detention middle, we made rosaries and even backgammon from bread crumbs,” Selezen provides.
Prisoners handle to cover ritual objects even in prisons, regardless of a number of searches carried out each day. For instance, an icon might be disguised as a matchbox. Dissident Vasyl Ovsienko, who served three phrases in Soviet camps as a member of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, recollects: “It’s not simple to decide on a second in a cramped cell to go to the bathroom, as a result of both somebody is consuming or somebody is praying.”
After his Soviet-era army service in Kazakhstan throughout the Nineties, my cousin Yurko Havryk returned to Ukraine and located himself penniless and jobless. He joined a gang and ended up behind bars. Playing video games have been well-liked amongst prisoners, largely cube and playing cards. These have been all hand-made: a cube was molded from bread, then painted with shoe polish. Holes have been pressed with a match and stuffed with white toothpaste. The playing cards have been constructed from extraordinary postal paper, glued in a number of layers for energy.
Yurko additionally instructed me about different souvenirs: candlesticks, picket mugs, cane knobs, Cossacks… In my assortment, I’ve an artefact fabricated from wooden: it represents a Hetman’s mace mendacity on a soccer boot. Maybe it was made for the Euro 2012 championship, which befell in Poland and Ukraine.
The well-known Ukrainian movie director Serhiy Parajanov was sentenced to 5 years in jail in 1974, throughout the Soviet interval. In captivity, he grew to become occupied with collages and made them from something: scraps of cloth, foil, items of barbed wire, fragments of damaged dishes, journal reproductions. In a single case, he was pressured to fix luggage, however as a substitute, he made a doll representing Pharaoh Tutankhamun from burlap. Parajanov was imprisoned within the Luhansk area within the east of Ukraine, the place the Donbas dumps [caused by mining] reminded him of the Egyptian pyramids, and the scenario of the prisoners, biblical slavery. Moreover, the time period “pharaoh” stands for policeman in conventional slang utilized by thieves. “A lot of Parajanov’s collages have been made in jail,” in response to his Ukrainian spouse Svitlana Shcherbatyuk. He made about 800 collages whereas in captivity. He additionally wrote in letters addressed to his spouse about different camp artists who created “tattoo exhibitions on the backs of associates.”
Tattoo artwork as social id
Pavlo Selezen has Jesus tattooed on his left shoulder and a scorpion on his neck. He says: “We had a German prisoner in our barracks, he used to make tattoos. He copied Jesus from some journal.” On this planet of camps and prisons, tattoos are a solution to assert one’s id. For instance, you possibly can distinguish between thieves, murderers, and robbers by the variety of blue stars tattooed on the physique, which signify what is named the “thieves’ go well with.” Non secular pictures are additionally well-liked: silhouettes of church buildings, the Mom of God, Jesus, and the cross. Patriotic tattoos are additionally widespread: a trident, a portrait of Bandera, or of Cossacks.
Some tattoos might be extraordinarily cynical. The plot of “Hell’s Stoker” was usually carved on … the buttocks. They might draw a satan with a shovel in his higher hooves. When an individual would stroll, the satan on their ass would transfer, as if throwing coal into his anus. The satan is a personality current in lots of jail tattoos. Older prisoners may carry a tattoo of a satan with Lenin’s face.
This type of toughness appeals to adventurous criminals. Artwork critics clarify that transgression is a psychological mechanism for creativity. It represents the need to transcend normalized boundaries, to interrupt taboos. For sociopaths, a big a part of the prison inhabitants, delinquent habits is attribute when they’re within the free world, and it appeals to them as effectively in its creative manifestations.
Artwork historians have a French time period for artifacts made by non-professional artists: artwork brut — tough, uncooked creativity. Or “outsider artwork,” which means it stands exterior of conventional artwork establishments. “Jail artwork” is created spontaneously, as if by itself, in moments of acute emotional upheaval: panic assaults, insomnia, assaults of paranoia, schizophrenia, or persecution mania. It represents an irregular state of the artist’s psyche, when the unconscious breaks free, and permits for the impact of the uncanny.
People who find themselves imprisoned learn greater than normal. Additionally they write loads: letters, requests, poems. Movie director Oleg Sentsov, who’s from Crimea, was imprisoned in a Russian occupation jail in 2014 and served 5 years. Throughout this time, he wrote a collection of tales. Non secular scholar Igor Kozlovsky and journalist Stanislav Aseev have been imprisoned within the self-proclaimed “DPR,” or Donetsk Folks’s Republic, created by Moscow within the east of Ukraine after it occupied most of its territory. Each recall that just a few notes on items of paper helped them preserve their spirit and thoughts.
Prisoners have loads of time to create, inform jokes or compose poems. Understanding the slang of thieves, referred to as “feni prisoner proverbs, songs — is extremely valued amongst prisoners. The poet Taras Lipolts, creator of the e-book “Legal Tales” (Kyiv, “Economics and Regulation,” 1998), collected jail folklore, together with proverbs, poems, shameful jokes, and anecdotes. These miniatures all the time comprise a subject related to prisoners. To start with, pressured sexual abstinence.
Oh, it’s snowing, it’s snowing,
a white blizzard.
And my dick stands,
like a hare’s ears.
Those that are serving sentences are additionally within the correlation between crime and punishment:
You have been overwhelmed close to the varsity –
as a result of I drank vodka there.
I used to be overwhelmed close to the church –
that’s the place I fucked a woman.
One other favourite style amongst prisoners contains proverbs. “He who understands life is in no hurry,” as a result of he’ll keep in jail for a very long time. Or, for instance, a proverb that sums up the peculiar philosophy of criminals and their ardour for all times: “Life is a card sport, and can is an ace.”
Girls’s artwork
In ladies’s prisons, crucial self-made artifacts are the so-called “marochki”: present handkerchiefs with colourful pictures and inscriptions. Flowers, elves, kittens, sailboats, or cupids are embroidered or drawn with felt-tip pens and multi-colored ballpoint pens. One of many prisoners’ favorite birds is the swan — an emblem of virginity, innocence, and constancy. Additionally, the Virgin Mary and the Son of God usually seem as a reminder of prison sin and penitential repentance on such artifacts.
The “marochki” often show monograms of family members, kids, and associates — these to whom they’re given. Ultimately, the handkerchief is sprayed with cologne and positioned in an envelope together with a letter. In the course of the Soviet Union, when most households noticed not less than one individual jailed or positioned in labor camps, prison newbie artwork grew to become vastly revered. Right this moment, the artwork of those prisoners is being exhibited in Ukraine, together with at Kyiv’s Sholem Aleichem Museum and the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra.
Prisoners could also be disadvantaged of rights, however many understand there are some values that nobody can take away from them. Article 27 of the Common Declaration of Human Rights states: “Everybody has the appropriate freely to benefit from the arts.” This, in reality, is likely one of the the reason why morally degraded prisoners turn into artists, carvers, and compose conventional songs resembling Kolomyyki. Masterpieces are, after all, uncommon. Nonetheless, it’s probably that the creative efforts of criminals contribute to their social rehabilitation.
Ukraine at present ranks among the many highest within the variety of imprisoned people inside the Council of Europe. The unusual artwork of prisoners is thus prone to turn into extra seen in its many kinds.
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