I discovered rave culture for myself in the 1990-x reading Ptyuch magazine and dreaming of visiting Berlin Love Parade some day
I discovered rave culture for myself in the 1990-x reading Ptyuch magazine and dreaming of visiting Berlin Love Parade some day. Starting from the late 1990-s I arranged parties in Barvy club, Kyivan Rus movie-theatre and other places together with a friend and classmate of mine. In 1999 I visited the last Kazantip festival that took place on Cape Kazantip. Before that I met Petr Mamonov, who encouraged and inspired me to try my hand as a DJ. But I didn’t become one, though I occasionally play post-punk and new rave music on parties styling myself as Ostgoth.
I think a new rave wave in Kyiv is largely connected with personal initiative and boldness of such people as Slava Lepsheev (SCHEME), who started to arrange straight-out mass events using experience of the true Kyiv movement and easily navigating in the global context. It has resonated well both with dance-floor old-timers and young people seeking something genuine and unadorned.
I think high noon of new rave and subcultural fashion makes Kyiv an icon city in the eyes of young people from various countries, but let us not exaggerate. For most tourists Kyiv will remain a city of strange golden domes, escort services, an ideal place for spotting Slavic beauty in Ukrainian girls, an exotic post-Soviet trash and a place with post-revolutionary burning smell.
Vova Vorotnev was born in a mining town of Chervonograd in the western Ukraine in 1979. He attended arts school, but later on chose humanities – he studied philosophy in the Red University and Kyiv-Mohyla Academy. His green years were dedicated to rock music, graffiti and vandalism. Gradually he got interested in arts.
I work in various media – graphics, installation, photography, performance. I often work with topics of identity and transformation of modern Ukrainian culture, dialectic between heritage and novelties, undermining hierarchy of cultural conventions, autobionarrative, etc.
Works by Vova Vorotnev were displayed at Dance, Dance, Dance exhibition, which took place in BURSA Gallery last year.