VIRTUAL London Heritages Conference

Abstract

“What all those dumb cupcakes doing in my feed? And then I realised that it’s because it’s Easter and Easter’s like Christmas for them, right? And a lot of people may have been celebrating Easter for the last time in a while with their family and certainly what seems super frivolous becomes deeply meaningful.” Tao Thomsen (founder Backup Ukraine) In April 2022, shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February of that year, four unlikely partners: UNESCO, a 3d start-up called POLYCAM, heritage protection and assistance organisation Blue Shield Denmark, and Virtue Worldwide, the creative agency of VICE Media Group, joined forces to ‘securely store digital records of historical artefacts based on smartphone image capture’. The archive, cleverly named Backup Ukraine, has been held up as a means of preservation in ‘real-time’. This paper examines the collection of one aspect of this archive, the capture of Ukrainian sweet Easter bread or Paska, to examine questions of shaping and documenting (H)eritage in real time. Drawing on scholarship that describes the historic role of cake as the centrepiece of social occasions, this paper uses the Paska captures within the Backup Ukraine archive to consider how the quotidian rituals of daily life, their meanings, histories and enactments can provide new insights into cultural heritage in the 21st century. “I think like getting that kind of citizen’s perspective on what should be part of our recorded history is actually not something I [had] thought of, but [it is] really, really beautiful.” Tao Thomsen (founder Backup Ukraine)