As part of the musical project “Total: Profitable”, the premiere of the chamber concert MANTU by musician Anton Kistrin, a native of the temporarily occupied Dneprorudny, took place. The performance, dedicated to Ukrainians in the temporarily occupied territories, combined the performance of original compositions with reflections on memory, home and cultural resistance.
Anton Kistrin is a songwriter, frontman of the group “Kimnata Gretchen” and creator of the solo project MANTU. If in the group he works with multi-layered texts and postmodern aesthetics, then he calls his solo project an attempt at “new sincerity” - music in which personal experiences, the memory of his native south and the experience of war sound as frankly as possible. In an exclusive interview for ZN. UA Anton Kistrin explains why culture is able to resist occupation, how the war changed him and why it will take many years of systematic work to rethink Ukrainian culture in the liberated territories.
During the live, the artist several times had difficulty restraining his emotions, remembering Dneprorudnoe. It was there that he graduated from school, formed his musical tastes and wrote his first songs.
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— Dneprorudne is a small town in the Zaporozhye region, which has been under Russian occupation for more than four years. During your performance in the project “Total: Profitable” you called it “a place of power” where a piece of your heart remains. What does the word “home” mean to you today What memories of your hometown and the south of Ukraine do you cherish most
— “Home” in a broad sense is one of the fundamental values \u200b\u200bfor a person. And I’m not talking about the everyday aspect now. Home is a place where you are welcome, where you feel in your own territory, on your own terms, safe. Unfortunately, I know many stories of my fellow countrymen who, for certain reasons, remained in the temporarily occupied territories and now do not feel at home, although they continue to live where they built their lives.
My native places are the southern shore of the Kakhovka reservoir, the steppes and salty estuaries of the Azov region, the road “to the sea”, which until 2022 could be reached in a couple of hours, and the dusty highway, which in the summer in childhood acquired the status of an extraterrestrial adventure. In general, since the human psyche stubbornly displaces all traumatic noir, my native places are associated with surprisingly endless summer, youth, and knowledge of the world through tastes and smells.
— What are you most afraid of losing from the memories of Dneprorudny and the people who still remain under occupation
— I’m sure that as long as I’m in my right mind, neither the routes nor the landscapes will fade from my memory, because they are all structuredly stored somewhere inside. Carefully, like my mother’s preserves in the cellar or on the shelves. And what I’m more afraid of is that perhaps there will be nothing to memorialize.
— The war changed the life of every Ukrainian. What has she changed the most about you And that, despite everything, she could not take away?
- That's it. Minus health, plus gray hair on the head and beard, a shaken psyche, periods of despondency and despair. We all in Ukraine had to “change the firmware”, we are all different people, with new acquired skills and an updated way of thinking.
What has changed the most? I think fear for loved ones, first of all. When the death of compatriots, people with whom you lived on the same street, literally turns from a tragedy into daily statistics, you begin to look at the concept of remaining time from a completely different angle. There is always a risk of not being on time....
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Is there anything that war couldn't take away Probably empathy. It seems to me that in me it manifests itself even excessively. Which, by the way, sometimes gets in the way, for example, in volunteer work. But I became more skeptical. And this, oddly enough, does not contradict empathy.
— Alexander Alekseev"
The war changed not only the musician’s life, but also his work. After 2022, more and more of Kistrin's songs became an attempt to comprehend traumatic experiences, memory and loss..
— What are you singing and writing about now, both in the group and in your solo project What motivates and inspires you
— I’ll start with the second question: I don’t believe in “inspiration” as a concept. Every song, text, arrangement is the result of work that sometimes you have to force yourself to do. Songwriting at the level I have now takes years of practice..
As for the group and the solo project, MANTU generally arose as a need to separate similar only in appearance, but in fact very different things written by the same author. It so happens that both “Gretchen’s Room” and MANTU are essentially very text-centric music. From ancient times to this day, there have been two fundamental genres in the song tradition: sermon and confession..
And if “Gretchen’s Room” is mainly about the first, then MANTU is a more introverted, self-absorbed, autotherapeutic, intimate creativity. “Gretchen’s Room” is a postmodern story with a mosaic of meanings, references in texts and references in music and style; MANTU is more of a meta-modernist return to “new sincerity”, when the path from perceiving the meaning of a song to emotion is shortened.
— Denis Polyakov. "
But in the songs that have been written since 2022 and are now being written for the group, and in the songs that I leave for a solo project, there is room for themes of experiencing traumatic experience, the importance of attention to mental health (as in the song “Zlamalos”), self-ironic self-diagnosis of a midlife crisis (as in the songs “Devil” or “Stop-Earth”), trigger-nostalgic lyrics (like “Cream”,.
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At the same time, the musician is convinced: today culture performs a much more important function than simply creating an artistic product. The musician also participates in various cultural and artistic events and helps raise funds for the needs of the Defense Forces.
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— Russia is trying to change not only the government in the occupied territories, but also the cultural space. Is it possible today to talk about culture as one of the main instruments of resistance And how?
— Undoubtedly, if culture means a certain code consisting of several layers. I am a child of the 90s, who grew up in the south of the country, which, like the east, suffered the most from creeping Russian expansion. In an era when there was no Internet and social networks, the consumption of Russian content was the norm for us, and only as an adult do you realize the causes and consequences of your hybrid Russified adolescence.
For me, let’s say, studying Ivasyuk’s songs at the age of over 30 was something like a conscious voluntary vaccination (think of the disease yourself). After all, of the tools capable of forming Ukrainian identity among young people of that time, the only ones that really worked were the school curriculum on Ukrainian literature and the conditional “Territory A” on television.
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Therefore, it is worth understanding that the cultural occupation of Ukraine took place long before the great war. It is a mistake to believe that “the enemy never spared resources for this”. It seems to me that at that time it was not difficult to capture the minds of consumers in Ukraine with Russian content - we considered ourselves part of their market, and Ukrainians happily turned their ears and eyes to this stream. On the other hand, culture is a much more subtle neurosurgical instrument than ballistic missiles.
— Should Ukrainian culture now prepare for the return of temporarily occupied territories What should this preparation be like
— The first thing that appears on deoccupied land and after its “cleansing” as a marker is the hoisted national flag. The presence of all official symbols on the territory and in space is the very first top layer of the identity code. Cultural products are already a deeper part of the code.
The task of culture in Ukraine today is, in fact, to survive. Constantly improve yourself and try not to lose relevance. And be ready to become a competitive alternative to the product that was propagated by the occupation regime.
— How do you imagine the day when Dneprorudnoye will be liberated What, in your opinion, should be the first cultural event in the city after de-occupation
- It won't happen instantly. Moreover, the de-occupied territories will not be a safe place for some time yet. But culture and its products, such as cultural events, cannot exist on their own, in a vacuum. This is, of course, very important, but it will not make sense without a set of other events - humanitarian missions, the mine clearance process, information campaigns for the population, medical and psychological assistance. Rethinking Ukrainian culture in these territories is a long game. I would like the organization of any such events to be not a one-time grant-eating event, but a systematic part of a consistent strategy.
— You recently joined the musical project “Total: Nazhivo”, dedicated to supporting the Resistance Movement and Ukrainians in the temporarily occupied territories. Why did you agree to this cooperation What main ideas did you want to convey with your speech
— In fact, this is one of the rare cases when, as they say, values \u200b\u200bcoincide. I learned about the project from my stage colleagues, watched individual episodes, we spent quite a long time agreeing on the possibility and dates of filming. But already on the set there was a final “coincidence”. Grateful to the wonderful professional team!
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During the live, the musician addressed Ukrainians in the occupied territories, calling each song “a brick in the bridge between those who continue to believe in Ukraine and those who are temporarily not with us.”. The musician concluded one of his addresses with the words: “Spring will certainly come, and this is the only forecast in which we should all believe.”.
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— Over more than four years of occupation, a whole generation of Ukrainians has grown up who cannot return home. What, in your opinion, helps not to lose touch with your hometown, even when it is not physically nearby
— If a person considers a connection with his native land one of his priorities, then he will find his own personal way to capture memories, preserve, transmit and disseminate knowledge about it.
Victoria Amelina wrote about this best in her poem “History for Turning Around”.
] Dim is growing little by little.
And no more.
remember, no.
you won't be without your home [.
(IN. Amelina, May 8, 2022).
It was this idea that the musician tried to convey during his performance in the “Total: Nazhivo” program, dedicating the concert to Ukrainians who continue to wait for the deoccupation of Ukrainian territories and the return home.