Digital space “Museum of Stolen Art”
year:2023
The Museum of Stolen Art is a volunteer project aimed at fighting against Russian aggression that serves as a digital space for preserving and documenting crimes against Ukrainian culture.
Russia’s full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022, was a crucial moment not only for millions of Ukrainians but also for many pieces of Ukrainian culture and art. Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, the Russians have stolen tens of thousands of works of art in Ukraine, including artifacts that are over a thousand years old. According to the Ministry of Culture, exhibits from 40 Ukrainian museums have been stolen or destroyed (as of October 2022). Olena Zenchenko talks about this in more detail in EFE.
This is an incredible loss and tragedy for our people, so we have created a space where you can view the stolen works from anywhere in the world from any device, drawing attention to this topic in the international information space.
It was a set of different techniques. We didn’t have a good exhibit that could be photographed from different angles, or 3D reconstructed, so we had to use references. And we found all these exhibits, all the textures, and all the photos of how they looked somewhere from fragments of videos on social media. For example, we didn’t have photos of the Bible that was stolen, but there was a video that the museum workers themselves shot a few years ago, where they literally showed the inside of the Bible for 5 seconds, and then we took the photo, enlarged it, aligned it, and superimposed it on the 3D object.
A key step in this process was a series of online tours.
The overall coverage of the campaign exceeded 1,810,268 million.
Information about the stolen art is scattered and fragmented. To find digital copies, we had to piece it together: from consulting with museum experts to visiting hostile media resources that feature these works. It’s almost a micro-investigation for each exhibit. Once the collection for the Museum had been assembled, we started creating a virtual space.
Our main task was to write a press release, texts, and personal letters for mailing to journalists and media, as well as prepare materials for social media to maximize the reach of the target audience. It was important to create visuals for the press and social media that would impressively reflect the essence of the museum. We developed a bilingual landing page and created Google forms for online tour registrations, which allowed people to choose a convenient time to visit the Museum.
Results
In total, we received 40+ mentions in Ukrainian online media, 5 live broadcasts, a plot in the United News, and more than 20 mentions in the international information space (including El Mundo, Infobae, SWI). Our online tours of the space were attended by 300 people and lasted over 3 hours in total.
The overall coverage of the campaign exceeded 1,810,268 million.