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Community of Communities, 2025

Representatives and associates of the Community of Communities outside Hägerstensåsens Medborgarhus following a project Sharing Session in May 2025.

Community of Communities

Community of Communities is a Swedish-Ukrainian cooperation project being carried out in 2025-2026. The project is catalysing social transformation in Ukraine by supporting professional development on the rural, regional and national levels. The project is focused on strengthening cultural institutions and cultural heritage, fostering trust between people and institutions, protecting human rights and facilitating Ukraine’s integration into the European Union. The project lends its title from Volodymyr Yermolenko, a Ukrainian public intellectual who has referred to his home country as a “community of communities”, forged by centuries of creative resilience.

The project partners are Baltic Art Center (Visby, Gotland, lead partner), Milvus Artistic Research Center (Knislinge, Skåne), Precarnia (Kyiv, Ukraine), Sorry No Rooms Available (Uzhhorod, Ukraine) and Urban Re-Public (Kherson/Odesa, Ukraine). Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas (Urbonas Studio, Cambridge, USA / Vilnius, Lithuania) serve as the project’s external advisors.

In the frame of the project:

Precarnia is building an archive of work by neurodiverse artists, bringing together materials from three complementary collections: atelienormalo, Pavlovka Psychiatric Hospital and workshop of possibilities. The center is doing so in dialogue with professional archivists and disability rights advocates.

Sorry No Rooms Available is organising production-based residencies for cultural practitioners from Ukraine and Sweden. The residents are developing site-specific work oriented around the subjects of reform, heritage and critique. In doing so, they are collaborating with peer institutions in the city of Uzhhorod.

Urban Re-Public is preparing the concept for a museum in Novovorontsovka, a settlement near the Kakhovka Dam, which was destroyed by the Russians in 2023. They are doing so using a participatory process of workshops, site visits and exhibitions with diverse stakeholders (e.g. artists, architects, public officials).

Over the course of the project, the partners are regularly meeting in-person, online and in hybrid formats. The partners use these meetings to develop mutual understanding and test how to share their work with different audiences – building communities in Ukraine, Sweden and beyond.

The project also includes research visits for the Ukrainian partners to Sweden. These visits help the partners effectively pursue their work while growing relations between Sweden and Ukraine.

Project updates are shared via a dedicated Instagram account (@communityofcommunities). Additional updates are shared by the partners on their respective platforms; partner links can be found on the right-hand side of this page.

Community of Communities

is the third Swedish-Ukrainian cooperation project that Baltic Art Center has participated in. In 2020-2021, Baltic Art Center, Milvus Artistic Research Center (lead partner), and Sorry No Rooms Available organised A smile and a handshake – a knowledge-sharing project funded by the Swedish Arts Council. And in 2022-2023, these three partners plus soma.majsternia organized Kindling – a project funded by the Swedish Institute, which provided structural support to Ukrainian artists, cultural practitioners and cultural organisations through production-oriented residencies.