Olesya Ostrovska-Lyuta spoke about the cultural prerequisites for forming a new social contract for Ukraine

Aspen Institute Kyiv, on the initiative of the Community Council, implements a project devoted to discussing a new social contract for Ukraine. Within the framework of the project, the Institute held three seminars and a discussion. During the debate, the general director of Art Arsenal, Olesya Ostrovska-Lyuta, spoke about the cultural prerequisites for forming a new social contract for Ukraine.

The speaker noted that national subjectivity is the fundamental prerequisite for forming a new social contract. It is closely related to another phenomenon that manifested during the war when many Ukrainians were forced to leave their homes — the experience of home as a tremendous value and a strong life metaphor. The reassessment of this experience contradicts our previous attitudes, which said everything is worse in Ukraine and better in other countries.

With the strengthening of the sense of one’s national subjectivity, the positions of other cultural phenomena will strengthen:

• The switch to the Ukrainian language. Strengthening the position of the Ukrainian language means supporting Ukrainian literature, Ukrainian journalism, and everything that uses the word.
• Interest in the history of culture has grown significantly over the past years. According to Ms. Olesya, the favorite exhibition of Mystetskyi Arsenal was about Ukrainian futurism. In general, the request regarding the history of Ukrainian culture continues to be the largest.
• The authority of Ukrainian intellectuals. Today, our society is ready to listen to Ukrainian scholars or rediscover Ukrainian intellectual figures like Hryhoriy Skovoroda and others.

Olesya Ostrovska-Lyuta noted that along with strengthening the positions of one’s own culture comes a much stronger sense of one’s centrality, which we also need to build up as a result of the colonial experience:

— What is happening to colonial cultures? Colonial cultures attribute the center of the world not to their world but somewhere outside: we are Ukrainians, and real life takes place somewhere in Moscow, Warsaw, or New York. At the moment when we begin to shift the center to the middle of our world and say that there are exciting things in our cultural history. What is, we change this centrality to ourselves. We have Lesya Ukrainka, who, strictly speaking, can be a pan-European phenomenon, or, let’s say, Skovoroda, a fascinating intellectual figure, and we should tell about him both to ourselves and others.