Kharkiv’s shattered landscapes: observations from the front line of the war in Ukraine

ABSTRACT

The Ukrainian city of Kharkiv has witnessed terrible destruction during the war with Russia. Many of its inhabitants have fallen victim to enemy shelling. Hundreds of objects and many urban areas turned into ruins. However, the destroyed private houses, high-rises, and even entire neighbourhoods in Kharkiv demonstrate that architecture lives even when it has been involuntarily abandoned, isn’t used, and isn’t experienced sensually, but is a part of complex systems of things, feelings, and communities. This work focuses on how damaged urban objects and places are being mourned, and how and where new ecological landscapes are being created. To answer these questions, the author went to the damaged places in Kharkiv (the city centre, residential areas, markets, memorials, and the subway) as a clean-up volunteer. Data collection was carried out from April to June 2022. The collected data are considered in the optics of posthumanism, with equal attention to the fragments of concrete, brick walls, broken glass, people and shell craters.

KEYWORDS:

• Ruin
• destruction
• ecology
• war in Ukraine
• posthumanism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The animal usually senses the oncoming of death and leaves its owner. Today, the owner will most likely use any medication to stop this, so that the ‘mortal’ being is no longer able to die. Let me remind you of the simple definition of dying given by Martin Heidegger. According to him, ‘to die means to be capable of death as death’ (cited in Harman 2015).

2 Khomchenko (2022).

3 Official website of the Kharkiv City Council (2022b).

4 Cherneta (2022).

5 Orlova (2022).

6 Cherneta (2022).

7 Cherneta (2022)

8 Kharkiv Today (2022a).

9 To ecologise according to Bruno Latuor means ‘to create procedures that enable us to follow a network of quasi-objects whose relations of subordination remain undefined and which, accordingly, prompt a new political action adapted to follow them’ (2021: 68).

10 The so-called ‘decommunization’ laws in their present form hearken back to Soviet practice of imposing certain ideology as correct. See more in Coynash (2015).

11 Pustiva (2022).

12 Official website of the Kharkiv City Council (2022a).

13 The Russians destroyed the largest number of houses in Kharkiv in the areas of Pivnichna Saltivka, P’yatyhatki, Zhukovsky, Rogan and Horizont. This was announced on the air of the national telethon on May 22 by the deputy head of the State Department of Emergency Situations in the Kharkiv region, Anatoliy Toryanik.

14 Kryvko (2022).

15 I did not receive answers to my inquiries in letters to the press secretary of the Drobytskyi Yar memorial. No one answers the phone calls.

16 See the history of destruction and rebirth of Coventry Cathedral here: https://heritagecalling.com/2019/08/14/the-destruction-and-rebirth-of-coventry-cathedral/.

17 A special version of the song ‘Hugs’ by the band ‘Ocean Elsa’ was filmed for the opening of the Ukrainian pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2022 under the title ‘This is Ukraine: defending freedom’. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tj7bgjirNfQ.

18 Smetana (2022).

19 Graduates danced near the ruins of their school in Kharkiv, https://fb.watch/du06fC8Q2N/.

20 On February 27, Russian special forces broke into the school building. In order to neutralize the occupiers and save the lives of Kharkiv residents, a battle took place: Ukrainian defenders neutralized a platoon of about 30 occupiers in the building.

21 Novosel (2022).

22 Taken from the authors Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/gamletzinkivskyi.

23 Video: press service of Kharkiv City Council, https://t.me/objectivetv/24989.

24 Vukovar’s total destruction during what would be the first phase of the wars in Yugoslavia invited comparisons to Stalingrad during World War II. See some photographs: https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2021/11/18/croatia-s-stalingrad-how-the-massacre-at-vukovar-still-casts-a-long-shadow-19-years-on.

25 As the anniversary of the fall of the besieged and devastated Croatian town of Vukovar approaches, dark tourism continues to flourish. According to Sandra M. Madarac, this specific form of tourism includes tours of places of torment and death, places of crime activities and also the places where genocide has occurred (Madarac 2020). Locals insist that the patrimonialization and memorial tourism bring back traumatic memories. Patrick Naef pays particular attention to two emblematic sites of a siege that traumatized the city (Neaf 2013).

26 Romanenko (2022).

27 Kharkiv Today (2022b).

28 New Voice (2022).

29 Their fate must be decided after the war based on the results of research, public discussions, and competitive tasks.

30 See more in the artistic school’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/aza_nizi_maza.

31 ‘Feldman Ecopark’ is a social and humanitarian multi-complex with a large zoo exhibition.

32 During the evacuation of animals in Kharkiv region, a 15-year-old boy was killed. Two more people are wounded. See Hromadske (2022).

33 Kharkiv zoo worked for free for Kharkiv’s residents after the reconstruction.

34 The zoo’s official instagram: https://instagram.com/kharkiv_zoo?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=.

35 ‘Zoomedia’ should be distinguished from Eugene Thacker’s concept of ‘biomedia’ (2004). He describes it as the intersection of bioscience and computer science, an intersection that plays out precisely in the relationship between genetic ‘codes’ and computer ‘codes’. For me, zoomedia is more about replacing the living with an artificial one in order to preserve biodiversity.

36 The Demogorgon is a tall, thin humanoid creature with elongated limbs from the popular TV-show ‘Stranger Things’.

37 By soulful, I mean places that have, generally, poor aesthetics, where the community of anonymous citizens is established, who do not hide their vulnerability here. See more about this in ‘Kharkiv’s soulful places’ (Zaiets 2020).

38 More about ‘Blind Windows’ project see: https://birdinflight.com/nathnennya-2/20220524-dmytro-zaiets.html.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by The Institute for Human Sciences (IWM, Vienna) and the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University (HURI) [Non-Residential Solidarity Fellowship to Support Ukrainian Scholars].

Notes on contributors

Dmytro Zaiets

Dmitry Zaiets is a Ukrainian independent sociologist and researcher. Author of a book on art and social memory, ‘Public Art of a Reminder’.