Recipes for Baking Bread: Stories from Holodomor

This paper explores the potential of creative practice to tell stories from Holodomor, Ukraine 1932–33 using graphic design and film. The results of the study are five animated documentaries: Recipes for Baking Bread, released in September 2021. I take reference from visual art and film, situating Mykola Bondarenko’s 1992–93 linocuts Ukraina 1933: Kulinara knyha (Ukraine 1933: A Cookbook) within Nicolas Bourriaud’s theories on “relational art”. Practices to describe “human interactions and its social context.”[1] I include a comparative analysis of three works by Jane Cheadle, Jordan Baseman and Theodore Ushev. The study questions the suitability of film and graphic design to tell stories, raise awareness, develop new creative practices and provide new research in the field. Following an introduction and background I separate my analysis into three parts: maps, poetry and Recipes for Baking Bread. The work includes in-depth analysis of letters as testimony from an engineer working in Ukraine during Holodomor, Jerry Berman. I explore the work of Gareth Jones, a Welsh journalist who reported from Holodomor from the perspective of his great nephew, an interview with Philip Colley. The project makes use of five interviews. The interviewees are: Jaroslaw Prytulak, Professor Serhii Ploky, Philip Colley, Dr Daria Mattingly, and Fr. Volodymyr Sampara with letters by Jerry Berman courtesy of Alison Marshall. I include evidence of new research available to scholars in public archives and online and a campaign for awareness of the Holodomor for general audiences. I conclude with a summary of impact. 1. Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance & Fronza Woods (Dijon-Quetigny: Les presses du réel, 2002), p. 14.