Faculty of Arts & Science

Digital Futures

Yana Mikhailava

What We Kept

What We Kept takes place inside the Belarusian Orthodox Church hall in downtown Toronto, a space that has long served as a home for cultural preservation among the Belarusian diaspora in Canada.At the center of the room stands a single performer. My mother wears a kashulya, a traditional Belarusian blouse whose linen was hand-woven by my great-grandmother, then sewn and embroidered by my mother. A hand-woven belt completes the partial costume. What is absent is deliberate: a woman's full traditional dress would include additional elements, but the costume is intentionally stripped back, leaving the lower half of the garment as a surface for projection. The rough linen texture becomes a canvas for digital intervention.Audio-reactive visuals are projected onto the dress as the performer sings along to a recording of her own choir; she is present while the rest of the ensemble is only there in sound. The imagery draws from the motifs of the songs themselves, the sun dancing at its peak, the bonfire growing in the summer dark, rendered in light that moves with the music. The technology is not simply decorative; it acts as a means of restoration, returning physical context to a song that has been separated from the place and people it is sung by.The title says it plainly. Cultural celebrations like Kupalle are no longer permitted within Belarus under the Lukashenko regime, and what survives exists here, in church halls and community centers, carried by elder generations who left the motherland but did not leave the culture behind. The solitary figure, the partial costume, the projected flame together speak to continuity and its cost. Not erasure, but incompleteness. A tradition kept alive, but only in pieces.