As commemorations of the 75th Anniversary of V-E Day pivots to the virtual sphere, the Russian RT’s digital department hopes to bring the poignancy of V-E Day to the web. Despite the complicated relationship between the East and West before and after the Second World War, for one brief day, Europe celebrated.
As most of the world continues to social distance in the age of Covid-19, RT’s unique commemoration efforts, including collaborations with Marina Amaral, world-renowned Brazilian artist and World War II magazine contributor, and Vincent Bal, Belgian artist and famous Shadowologist, has turned the celebrations digital.
Their website #VictoryPages offers “an opportunity to look at the historical magnitude” of V-E Day “through personal impressions of our contemporaries.” A social media documentary project created “for the young and by the young, uses the language of modern media, on five social networks. A fresh page in the story of the Victory, it reads through visual art, interactive formats and dynamic real-time storytelling.”
Follow along as their twitter account reconstructs a first-person narrative of the events from January to May 1945, or peruse their Instagram account which features snippets from thousands of actual letters written during the war. One can even download the “Victory Alphabet” which was created by compiling hundreds of original inscriptions left on the Reichstag walls by Allied soldiers in May of 1945. “Behind each font character” #VictoryPages states, “there is a real letter, hand-written by soldiers 75 years ago.”
*All photographs courtesy Vincent Bal.