MUSIKALISCHER RAUM
Allow yourself to sound!
Who we are
Music Space is a creative initiative and community in Vienna that, through shared choir and vocal experience, body percussion and movement, creates opportunities for temporarily displaced musicians, their families, as well as music professionals and enthusiasts with migration experience, to realise their creative potential through joint activities. Through vocal sessions, concerts, therapeutic singing-dance performances, and pedagogical activities, the initiative creates an environment for participants to support each other, facilitate healing from the trauma of losing their homes and find their place in Austria's creative and educational landscape.
The community was created in the summer of 2022 at the initiative and creative leadership of Arina Chernenko-Movilian, a music educator, choirmaster, and vocalist from Odessa, who, due to the war, came to Vienna with her children. The project participants are Ukrainian women - music educators and musicians who were forced to temporarily leave Ukraine due to the full-scale war and take their children to a safe environment, as well as artists of migration origin from Romania, Poland, Ukraine, and France, who reside in Vienna. Our performances are our gratitude to each listener for their incredible help and support and the warmth we feel in these difficult times. We want to give project participants and viewers hope, inspiration, and motivation to continue their creativity and favourite job under any circumstances and despite all difficulties.
Our vision for the future is to create an artistic and educational space that will expand opportunities for musicians who have recently moved to Austria to receive support, creative, teaching and project experience through the implementation of joint artistic and pedagogical projects and together help people with migration experience successfully integrate into social life in Austria through music.
What we do
The founder and participants of the project are Ukrainian women - musicians, music teachers, and students who have been displaced to Austria from different parts of Ukraine with their children. The initiative proactively engages new musicians and amateurs temporarily displaced from Ukraine due to the full-scale invasion and local musicians and cultural figures with migration backgrounds in our community.
Through shared vocal lessons, concerts, and pedagogical activities, the initiative's participants support each other, create a healing environment for the wounds of war and displacement, and find their place in Austria's creative and educational landscape.
The initiative, through the experience of choir and body percussion, creates spaces for temporarily displaced women musicians, their families, and interested music professionals and amateurs with migration experience to realise their creative potential in joint activities and, through shared classes and performances, promote integration into local communities.
In less than a year of its existence, the initiative's participants have held numerous concerts in the places of temporary residence of displaced families from Ukraine, as well as in churches for local communities in Austria together with musicians from France, Austria, Romania, and Poland, most of whom later joined the initiative. In their performances, the artists combined classical and spiritual music from contemporary Ukrainian and other European composers and elements of modern music performance.
The participants give particular attention to working on the topic of losing their homes and finding a sense of home through shared creativity. Inspired by a contemporary mass written by Austrian composer Florian C. Reithner, the group began creating a joint therapeutic vocal and dance performance "We Are All Maria", aimed at collectively experiencing the trauma of losing their homes. The initiative experiments not only with vocals but also with art therapy methods such as body percussion and movement, which help to work through their experiences of displacement and trauma and find healing through music, contact with their bodies and movement.
Joint art experience creates an environment in which Ukrainian temporarily displaced women musicians can feel not victimised, but empowered to create despite the challenging conditions they find themselves in.
The initiative is part of the Unlimited Academy of the Vienna-based NGO Unlimited Democracy.