![]() The idea was, said architect Slava Balbek, who is also a volunteer in the armed forces, “to retain a fragment of the war”. A Kyiv architectural studio, Balbek Bureau, came up with the concept of stabilising the ruins of the blown bridge over the river Irpin, leaving them in place alongside its newly constructed replacement. In Irpin there has been a public debate about how to commemorate the events there. This is a war we’ve had to fight in trainers, not military boots – we haven’t had the luxury of time and preparation.” “I don’t like it as art,” said a friend of mine, a Vinnytsia native, “but people needed something now, and they can’t wait. Only a year later, a memorial was unveiled, each victim symbolised by a dove. ![]() In Vinnytsia in central Ukraine, 29 people were killed by a strike on the city centre in July 2022. Photograph: Anastasia Vlasova/The GuardianĪs the war grinds on without any conclusion in sight, it is not just in Kharkiv that Ukrainians are building memorials to those who have been lost. ![]() Volodymyr Korniicha unfolds the Ukrainian flag on the improvised memorial to Maksym Buhyra, killed in Kamianka, Kharkiv. In his work, evidence-gathering and memory-keeping shade together. His images have been the basis of an immersive installation, seen this year at the Cannes and London film festivals – a novel means of trying to bring home the effects of the war to outsiders. It is partly a matter of collecting evidence, he says, and partly “to preserve in the memory what happened”. He is using the technique to build tremendously detailed, incontestably accurate digital models of damaged buildings before they are renovated. Lately, though, he has been immersing himself in photogrammetry, which uses thousands of photographs to create high-precision 3D maps of spaces. Irpin, the commuter city west of Kyiv that was occupied at the start of the full-scale invasion and was the scene of horrific killings, is the home town of Artem Ivanenko, a CGI and visual effects specialist for film and TV. Every time I passed it, when reporting from the city this autumn, I thought of the fathomless, mysterious Black Square, the great Ukrainian artist Kazimir Malevich’s pioneering work of abstraction.īut still, in a context in which misinformation from the Russian propaganda machine is rife, Ukrainians are finding ever more inventive ways to render with irrefutable accuracy the grim reality that “everything happened here”. Now the place has become a near-undetectable darkening in the asphalt. When a cruise missile hit an intersection in central Kyiv in October last year, killing several people, the cratered highway was repaired 48 hours later, leaving what was at first an obvious black square in the road. You might easily imagine that “nothing happened here”. When people are killed and cities mutilated, the understandable tendency in Ukraine is to patch up urban environments as swiftly as possible, though it can feel strange when the external signs of violence are tidied away so resolutely that no trace remains. On the other hand, the recent past pushes forward with all its grief, a visceral need for mourning, and insistent demand for remembrance. Pushkin Park in Kyiv, for instance, is now Ivan Bahrianyi Park, named after the 20th-century Ukrainian novelist and dissident.Ī CGI of Balbek Bureau’s Open Fracture memorial project at the destroyed bridge in Irpin, Ukraine. Over the past century, the author of Eugene Onegin has been so thoroughly appropriated as a metonym for the Russkiy mir, or Russian political and cultural space, and so consistently instrumentalised as a marker of Russian power and influence, that he has fallen foul of new Ukrainian decolonisation laws. While many public sculptures in the capital and other cities are sandbagged and protected from missiles, Pushkinopad, or Pushkin-fall, is the name given to the steady removal of statues of the Russian poet from Ukrainian streets and squares. On one hand, history is being rapidly reassessed. ![]() Ukraine’s landscape of memory is in a state of flux. Still, when I visited, little offerings of toys had been left at the statue’s base: evidence that many people disagreed, and found it a useful focus of contemplation. To my taste, it is a triumph of kitsch, whose sentimentality is out of step with the profound tragedies it commemorates. Officially unveiled this summer by the first lady, Olena Zelenska, the bronze assemblage depicts a young boy and girl in the guise of angels, apparently embarking on a winged ascent to heaven. In Shevchenko City Garden, in Kharkiv, eastern Ukraine, there is a new memorial to the children killed by invading Russians. ![]()
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