HeMo lab: A Platform for Monitoring and Reconception of Cultural Heritage of Ukraine

Russia's war is destroying Ukrainians and our heritage faster than the Soviet Union did, which left the system of governance inefficient. Without heritage registers – what are we really saving? Without a data infrastructure – how can we manage tons of data from field expeditions to make available for conservation or criminal investigations? The number of destructions is increasing, as are the initiatives that document them in their own way and form a chaotic accumulation without metadata. There is lack of basic heritage registers from state authoritative data sets; there are no policies for working with data; extremely low capacity of state bodies to monitor heritage.

We are building HeMo, a monitoring laboratory. HeMo collects up-to-date heritage data, links it to the register and places it in a database according to standards and an infrastructure approach, and makes it available to beneficiaries - for the ministry, for regional administrations, for donors, conservators and special services. We do 3D models, damage assessment and forensic documentation of heritage destruction. We create a data and GIS infrastructure to verify and store information. Our goals are restoration of objects; return of stolen artifacts; criminal proceedings against russia; presentation, popularization of heritage; heritage management. We also attract and train experts and activists to use monitoring tools and scale up in regions, creating a network. After the war, HeMo lab will become a civil society tool for public monitoring of the state of heritage and conservation as a lever on a sustainable basis.

Vasyl Rozhko

When: Friday 1 Sept, 13:00 - 14:00 BST
Where: New Physics Building, room Larmor

Biography

Vasyl Rozhko is the founder of HeMo: Ukrainian Heritage Monitoring Lab and the co-founder and co-coordinator of Heritage Emergency Response Initiative, HERI. He currently serves as the head of Tustan NGO, which is involved in promoting the protection and development of the Annalistic Town of Tustan and its protected areas. In the past he worked as the Head of the Department of Museums for the Ministry of Culture of Ukraine, where his responsibilities included crisis emergency response management for museums and inventory of museums and collections in Ukraine, among other tasks. Between the years 2005 and 2014 he led the Tustan State Historical and Cultural Reserve, where he was in charge of heritage property and protection documentation procedures, Cliffs technical monitoring and conservation program, graphical reconstruction of the medieval log cliffside fortress of Tustan, and the Ukrainian Medieval Culture Festival ‘Tu Stan!’. He is a graduate of the Lviv Business School of UCU and Lviv Polytechnic National University.