The project is ongoing, and the TURNS funding enabled Lisa Glybchenko to travel to Nordic cities holding twin-city partnerships with Ukrainian cities and explore Nordic-Ukrainian city collaboration through independent and collaborative (digital) artistic methodologies.
Watch a TRAVEL BLOG by the author Lisa Glybchenko.
How this project came to be
This project is a build-up on Lisa’s award-winning and defended Ph.D. “Visual PeaceTech” (Tampere University, 2025). The Ph.D. project explored digital visuality of security/peace, virtual reality as a tool of digital diplomacy and peacebuilding, and augmented reality technologies as tools for implementing peaceful futures. Although the Ph.D. is in the field of International Relations and did not directly engage with the fields of architectural design and urban studies, these fields were fundamental to the research and shaped Lisa’s perspective of how Visual PeaceTech might be developed outside of the doctoral framework.
For instance, Lisa took an active part in learning about employing urban/architectural design as a strategy of social transformation during the 2021 summer school “Learning from Jerusalem/Al-Quds: Conflict, Negotiation and the Politics of Infrastructure in the City” at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem. In 2024, Lisa was part of one of the teams competing within the “Cultural Weekend” ideathon, organized by Cultural Mondays and Goethe Institute Ukraine. The ideathon aimed to develop entrepreneurial urban initiatives to support war-affected and post-war Kyiv, Ukraine. Lisa’s artistic work as part of Pirkanmaa’s largest ever art event, Ruudun takaa (2024), became the final inspiration Lisa needed to create the new project design. Lisa’s 3-piece artwork was dedicated to the celebration of the 70th anniversary of the “twin city” partnership between Tampere and Kyiv.
Already during her Ph.D. research, Lisa became interested in the practice of creating digital twins, increasingly popular in city development (see “Smart Tampere”, Nordic Smart City Solutions), as a PeaceTech methodology of futures design. In this project, PeaceTech is understood as the design and application of digital technologies, tools, and techniques to peacebuilding work (see Glybchenko, 2023), particularly with (displaced) Ukrainians in the Nordic region and the Nordic host communities. Futures design, here, refers to the creation of demonstration models of desired futures peace arrangements (as in Glybchenko, 2024) in the context of Russia’s ongoing war of aggression against Ukraine and after the Ukrainian victory.
What Is This Project About?
This project develops a series of artistic workshops and exhibitions dedicated to the practice of creating digital twins in twin-city collaborations between different Nordic countries, as well as between Nordic countries and Ukraine. During the workshops in the Nordic countries, participants create sketches of blended cities (the imaginary Tampere-Odense city by participants in Odense, Denmark; or Tampere-Kyiv by participants in Tampere, Finland) as futures design of urban peace arrangements. The exercise serves as a trauma-informed way to discuss and imagine the future of Nordic identities, Nordic security, and Nordic collaboration with displaced/diaspora Ukrainians and Ukraine during/after Russia’s war against Ukraine.
As a trained artist and workshop facilitator, Lisa Glybchenko turns the sketches into 3D prints of the cities as playful artefacts to build demos of peaceful futures. These 3D-prints serve as ‘diegetic prototypes’ to further research the practical and theoretical entanglements of urban practices, digital technologies, art practices, Nordic-Ukrainian collaboration, as well as peace and security. In futures research, diegetic prototypes are understood as artefacts from the future which “make that future tangible in the truest sense of the word” and which help “overcome … doubts [if any] that change is possible” (Groβ & Mandir, 2024, pp.92-93). The 3D prints will be used as diegetic artefacts of peaceful futures to explore what peaceful futures mean in detail for the communities in question.
The upcoming exhibitions of 2D and 3D artworks, along with new futures design workshops on the exhibition premises, will open the discussion to larger communities in each country participating in the project.
Travel Itineraries and Original Artistic Reflections
After an incredibly insightful workshop with Ukrainians at Ukraina Talo in Tampere, Finland, Lisa Glybchenko went on a Nordic trip to gather visual materials for independent digital and analogue artmaking related to the project’s idea.
The first stop of the trip was Iceland, particularly the cities of Reykjavík (twin-city of Lviv, Ukraine) and Kópavogur (twin city of Tampere, Finland). While the digital and 3D artworks will be displayed later, here are some visual reflections in an analogue form.
The second stop was the Faroe Islands, specifically the capital city of Tórshavn and the city of Klaksvík (twin city of Tampere, Finland).
The third and final stop was Denmark – Copenhagen. Copenhagen has a twin-city partnership with Kyiv, Ukraine, as does Tampere, Finland. All the analogue artworks will be built into an urban travelog and exhibited in the future.
Previously, visual materials were also collected in other Nordic and Ukrainian cities. With the help of the Opstart funding from Nordisk Kulturfond / Nordic Culture Fund, Lisa Glybchenko gathered visual materials in Trondheim, Norway, and Norrköping, Sweden. In 2024, Lisa also gathered visual art materials in Kyiv and Lviv, Ukraine.
Further work
Some results of this project have already been used in the pre-recorded course series “Futures Design in Conflict-Affected Contexts”, which Lisa Glybchenko designed and developed for the Bosch Alumni Network with the support of the International Alumni Center gGmbH (iac Berlin). Further workshops and exhibitions are planned to be organized throughout 2026. You can follow the project on Lisa’s arts Instagram page: https://www.instagram.com/lisa_artist_glybchenko/
Lisa Glybchenko holds a Ph.D. in International Relations. Her award-winning research project “Visual PeaceTech” focused on intersections of visual design innovation and tech innovation to support peace processes, especially in Ukraine. Lisa is also an artist and design entrepreneur.
Bibliography (excluding previously linked resources):
Glybchenko, Y. (2023). Virtual Reality Technologies as PeaceTech: Supporting Ukraine in Practice and Research. Journal of peacebuilding & development. [Online] 19 (1), 117–122.
Glybchenko, Y. (2024). Unfuturing peace: augmented reality image design for Guerrilla peacebuilding. Digital War. [Online] 5 (3), 213–228.
Groβ, B., & Mandir, E. (2024). Designing Futures: A guide to exploring, visualizing and negotiating future scenarios. London, the UK: Lawrence King.
Nordic Smart City Solutions. (n.d). Smart Tampere. Available at: https://nscn.eu/Tampere
