Kamyanske in Dnipropetrovsk region became the 7th Ukrainian city to integrate a KONTENTA audiovisual studio. The new project for the adolescents of the community was presented by the Cultural Platform of Zakarpattya NGO
The youth of Kamyanske can hold individual studio work, group classes and lectures, record vocals and musical instruments, shoot video blogs and podcasts free of charge. The main mission of the “KONTENTA” project is to sustain mental health, increase resilience, and support the development of young people in the field of creative industries.
— Since the beginning of 2024, our programs have reached about one hundred thousand young people, — says Yevhen Zabarylo, co-founder of the Cultural Platform Zakarpattya NGO. — Here, in Kamyanske, we also worked with young people and researched the local context. After all, we chose 20 communities in which KONTENTA will operate based on the context — and yours is impressive. What is essentially unique is that your city has an iron heart that once grew from great stone rapids into other solid forms such as steel. You can feel this aesthetic when you come here. I really want to work with this to engrain this curiosity into the youth, so that they do not want to leave this place, but on the contrary, feel its power.
KONTENTA audiovisual studio works at Center For Youth Initiatives. The latter is a unique location—Kamyanske’s only communal enterprise run by the youth that was created for the young people.
— We are trying to develop the youth infrastructure as much as possible, — says the director of the Center, Kateryna Borovyk. — We work and communicate with young people all the time. We collect feedback on what they want now, what is truly needed and relevant.
Youth initiatives are supported by the local government. Kamyanske city mayor Andrii Bilousov is convinced that KONTENTA is important for the community because it will create additional conditions for creative self-expression and youth development:
— I am grateful to the Cultural Platform Zakarpattya NGO for creating this modern studio in Kamyanske. There are a lot of talented young people in our city. The Center For Youth Initiatives holds various events. And we really need this equipment so that young people from our city and those young people who have found shelter in Kamyanske also get conditions for high-quality self-expression and communication in this studio. Thank you for supporting our city!
KONTENTA in Kamyanske has all the necessary equipment and software to work in different modes depending on the content being created. It could be recording vocals, creating a music track, filming a podcast, or holding a workshop.
— The essence of this box is that everything is already installed in it: just turn it on. It has quite high-quality equipment. The camera shoots in 4K format, 30 frames per second. You can process the recorded material immediately on the laptop. It has Licensed Ableton and Native Sound programs which were given to us by these companies because they are interested in interacting with Ukrainian youth. Given that there will be 20 such studios, we want to bring active youth together into one network. And in the future, we plan to create a mobility program, within the framework of which teenagers will be able to come to other youth centers and do projects together, — Yevhen Zabarylo explains.
Since 2016, the Cultural Platform Zakarpattya NGO has been creating ethically humane digital products based on Ukrainian identity and focused on user well-being. Most cultural phenomena are hybrids that Ukrainians inherited from the Soviet era: they have nothing in common with Ukrainian identity. One of the tasks of the civil society organization is to update the knowledge young people have about the truly Ukrainian phenomena.
— Since 2016, we have openly talked about the fact that museums should be completely different; the forms of presentation and dissemination of knowledge about Ukrainian identity for young people should be completely different. Because the already-existing forms are unattractive. They present no distinct advantages of why being a citizen of Ukraine is promising. Therefore, through working with these themes, we began researching visual arts, and through that we moved on to sacred architecture — wooden churches. The latter are our largest flash drive containing all the brilliant things that people who did not have the Internet could convey to us. They weren’t transferring files—they were building churches. Next, we worked with the topic of “Chervona Ruta” in 1989 as the first youth festival of Ukrainian contemporary music at that time. And doing such things, we gained expertise and proved that we can work with adolescents, — continues Yevhen Zabarylo.
All programs developed by the Cultural Platform Zakarpattya NGO are aimed at young people as the most promising part of society. The resilience of Ukrainian youth today is a phenomenon that deserves the attention of the whole world. So the Cultural Platform team helps create artifacts that preserve this phenomenon in a historical context.
The youth of Kamyanske
— We keep declaring that young people, if considered from the point of view of technology, are the fastest processors we have. Thus, they are the most intelligent ones. Certain cultural artifacts are created at the workshops that we hold. These are physical objects, content or anything created by young people that has identity and reflects the aspects of the creative economy. While we are in the midst of the greatest disaster the 21st century has faced, Ukrainian teenagers are generating new cultural artifacts. These should be placed in museums as living proof of the concept of resilience. The youth of the world today are struggling with mental health and motivation. But just imagine if these people had heard an air raid siren or the sound of a rocket at least once, what would have happened to them? While our young people experience all this, process it and remain able to create something. Most of them are stable. And no one can explain this phenomenon. But I think that many films and books will be written about that. This is a phenomenon of the era. The first presentation of such artifacts took place at the Ukrainian House. Now we are trying to bring this exhibition abroad to show foreigners how unique this genetic code of Ukrainians is. We must take this experience as an example, explore and scale it, — emphasizes the head of the NGO Yevhen Zabarylo.
Tetiana Koliadych
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