All Together 2024: the Festival for Kids and Teens Is Over in the Mystetskyi Arsenal

On September 20-22, the Mystetskyi Arsenal hosted the festival for kids and teens All Together—an annual project of the institution about learning of various experiences and people through interaction, search, play and free choice.

Kids, teens and their parents got to know about numerous opportunities and tried something unexpected and new. At the Festival, they could learn and even examine by touch how to comprehend and accept the present, to understand prevailing prejudices and develop new approaches, to seek and find solutions to defend their country and build its future, where the rights of every citizen were protected by law and the constitution, to communicate with each other and with military servicemen, servicewomen and veterans in a new way. How to unite around valuable cultural heritage, take care of it, recognize its uniqueness. How to create something of your own, navigate the cultural landscape of today and grow in volunteering and mutual, cohesive assistance. How and where to study languages, to know and accept yourself and your capabilities, as well as the otherness of others, to treat people around you with care. How to combine technology and art, where to go with your startup and where to make your first prototype, how to fly a drone and make robots. How and where to do, try and see many other things.

Numerous participants from all over Ukraine, including Dnipro, Kropyvnytskyi, Kherson, Odesa, Mykolaiv, Okhtyrka, Kramatorsk, Chuhuiev, Lutsk, Chornomorsk and others, presented their practices and initiatives in the space of the Festival.

“The festival All Together is an opportunity to bring together various cultural institutions, organizations of formal and informal education and schools, as well as to create a place for them to meet kids and teens. All of them are different—both kids and the organizations which introduce various educational initiatives and practices, so we see our task as supporting diversity in all its manifestations, creating opportunities for its implementation and development. We believe that strict disciplinary norms and restrictions on kids’ creativity and self-expression should remain a thing of the past. Our Festival maintains a comfortable, friendly atmosphere that encourages kids to express themselves, create, fool around, play and learn in a fun and accessible way. And for organizations, our Festival is an opportunity to test their formats of interaction with kids, to join such a large-scale event as a festival, to meet colleagues and to tell about themselves to various audiences—both the professional and general ones: kids and parents,” Hanna Klymenko, the Head of the Department of Educational Programs, curator of the festival All Together, says.

All visitors interested in learning how to confidently navigate today’s diverse world could get to know about new spheres of life, manifestations of culture and society.

Interactive games, streaming classes, cool toys and non-standard tasks, drone simulators, VR glasses, reading and books and much more were presented at 42 stands.
In the Workshops (places of free creativity, meetings and useful activities), visitors were offered board games, master classes in acting, a real academy of blogging on TikTok, fun gardening, fighting fakes, etc.

In the festival space, six art projects were presented, alongside which visitors could indulge in fantasies and sometimes engage in joint creativity: What Tomorrow Consists Of (Anastasiia Leliuk), The Reverse Landscape (Dasha Podoltseva), Creating-Living (DI(YA)TY), Creating the History of Ukraine in 5 Minutes (Actually Longer) (Sashko Danylenko), The Pregnant Blue Dog Just Howling at the Moon from the series Too Gentle Objects (Leonora Yanko), Seven Fears (curator: Katya Buchachka; artists: Anna Sapon, Vlada Dyka, Oleksii Ovdiienko, Vladyslav Krasnoshchok, Fedir Khorkov, Karina Synytsia).

This year, the festival program contained more than 70 events and consisted of two key parts. The traditional part of the program—events for kids under 12 years old—contained about 30 events. This year’s innovation was a special program for teens, which contained 37 events and was developed for the first time within this educational Festival. 13 lectures, plays, performances, discussions, workshops, master classes and DJ sets took place on the stage. And in the lecture hall, in two teens workshops and in the lounge, visitors watched movies, improved their English, participated in art workshops and just socialized, fooled around and learned something new. This year the Festival attracted about 4 thousand visitors.

At the Festival the following components were constantly available:
• stands where the participants offered their educational game programs;
• interactive art projects;
• master classes, stage performances, movie showings;
• game routes that united different participants;
• separate educational and game areas;
• Playset safe play area for kids from 0 to 4 years old and a room of silence.

The festival All Together is an annual project of the Mystetskyi Arsenal. In 2024, it was held for the ninth time.

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Organizer: Mystetskyi Arsenal in cooperation with Art Arsenal Community NGO.

Curatorial group:

Hanna Klymenko
Liana Komardenko
Kateryna Makarova
Olha Olkhovska
Maryna Askurava

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The festival for kids and teens All Together is supported by the European Union within the program House of Europe and the Partnership for a Strong Ukraine Foundation, which is financed by the governments of the United Kingdom, Estonia, Canada, the Netherlands, the United States of America, Finland, Switzerland and Sweden.

Partners:

Goethe-Institut Ukraine

First Cambridge Centre

Worldview educational system for teenagers Zminotvortsi

NGO Kyiv Educational Center Toler Space

The Khanenko Museum

LoraShen

POPARADA

Media partners:

Dity v misti

StarlightMedia

Liroom

Shtuka media