The role of culture and creative practices in the recovery of Ukraine: building forward with Lanka.pro collective

“There was a portal and you could sense something emerging at the end, but you didn’t know what it would be”, says Anna during our call. I am speaking to Anna Karnaukh and Kateryna Kravchuk about the early days of the full invasion when they agreed to meet every week to talk about the future of Ukraine, despite the violent invasion trying to destroy any hope for one. It is these early notes that have become the foundation and blueprint of Lanka.pro, a collective who leads from and prototypes the emerging future of Ukraine.

The word ‘Lanka’ means ‘link’ in Ukrainian. A fitting name for a collective whose mission is to generate connections between people, communities and sectors. They work on bottom-up and policy levels, spending a day in Brussels as cultural diplomats and the next testing a card game that helps communities understand their cultural assets. This is the unique methodology of Lanka I am so impressed by. They work on cross-sectoral dialogue to find common ground between culture, economics and education, but also support creative entrepreneurs and produce analytics for educational programmes. These leverage points allow them to address the problem that they believe is somewhere ‘between’—in the lack of connection and collaboration in this ecosystem.

Questions are many and uncertainty is the norm. What is the role of an arts organisation in a war? What should artists and cultural workers do in this moment? What is… or was… culture for Ukrainians? How to balance facilitating creative solutions for survival and also imagine a post-war recovery? Is it too soon, or even appropriate, to talk about this future?

As we touch on some of these questions with Anna and Kateryna, they paraphrase a social media post from Ukrainian philosopher Volodymyr Yermolenko about how people tend to think that only the most limited amount of things matter in this moment, but, actually, to not think about the future and to not act for the sake of it, would be to accept yourself as without one.

It is in these entangled processes of survival, resistance and activism where whole new artistic modalities and cultural meanings emerge. It is here where the value and impact of culture and artists is amplified. This is illustrated well by Lanka’s work with creative hubs across the country, including the frontline area of Zaporizhzhia where a strong appetite for cultural events—especially those with a decolonial lens—has emerged post-invasion. This is the vacuum that appears when Russian colonial-imperial narratives are dismantled and the cultural space as transformation is revealed.

It is this idea of transformation that also informs the language Lanka use to talk about the recovery of Ukraine. Lanka is not ‘rebuilding’ or even ‘building back better’—they are building forward. Theirs is a process of social and cultural innovation that combines a holistic view of the creative economy with awareness-based systems change, inspired in part by the teachings of MIT’s u-school for Transformation and the portfolio of Indy Johar and Dark Matter Labs.

At its core, Lanka.pro advocates for and empowers cultural activists as agents of change across the social and environmental sphere. While culture is a deeply cross-cutting issue across all areas of human activity, it is rarely recognised as such in policy. That arts and culture are unable to transmit their transformative messages is not a problem specific to Ukraine. But right now, as all funds are channelled to the frontline and the whole country is asking how to create added value with limited resources, getting culture high on the policy agenda seems even more unrealistic.

While Anna and Kateryna predict that external sources will be key to the survival of the sector, they maintain that internal reform and institutional support are sorely needed for its resilience. In their report for the Cultural Relations Platform (2024), they highlight the potential of culture to drive regional and economic development, but one that needs systemic investment through creative education and skills training.

What seems like a key challenge to revise—or perhaps an opportunity to reimagine—is around 30,000 assets of municipal and state cultural infrastructure, often underused and low in resource. The potential here is sheer amount of space that could be used for capacity-building programmes and for scaling horizontally the social and artistic-cultural innovations that have emerged over the past two years. Their walls, soundscapes and gardens could be shaped by artists for communal gatherings, self-expression and deep listening—to aid social cohesion at this time of competing narratives.

This is the unique sense-making impact that can be unleashed when cultural infrastructure extends beyond ‘regular’ services and connects deeply with its environment and communities. Kateryna and Anna are hopeful that small islands of change are emerging across the country. For example, they recently facilitated a connection between a small number of horticultural therapists and leaders of cultural infrastructure to create gardens in their spaces. This example also illustrates the centrality of nature and land as the source of authenticity and healing in Lanka’s work. ‘For Ukrainians, land is a cultural asset,’ says Kateryna: it is something that you can hear in the music and see in the craft. And while the highly industrialised Soviet occupation broke these deep connections between the land and its people, dialogue with nature is now emerging as a strong theme across contemporary arts. It is wounded and subject to processes of resourcification, but also literally the ground upon which to regeneratively reimagine the country’s economy and infrastructure.

For this purpose, Lanka.pro has developed a unique card game called AI Genius Loci, which helps communities discuss their environment and cultural assets. Throughout testing this game, they have encouraged people to articulate those places that inspire them beyond national heritage and start recovering nature and intangible assets as part of the cultural. This process reveals a deeper layer to ‘recovery’ as Lanka visions that each community can be empowered to reconnect with the spirit of their place. The AI simulator tool acts as an invisible facilitator and provides a decentralised
structure for communities to sense and design strategies from their emerging future, allowing groups to essentially be their own consultants.

With projects like this, Lanka.pro continues to innovate and inspire at every step. As we come to the end of our conversation, they share their plan to start a book club in the autumn and seem only a little bit concerned about the viability of this idea during frequent blackouts. That the first ten books ordered are about systems thinking is a great illustration of how Lanka.pro works: building capacity and trying to shift big conversations one card game at a time.