A community exists when it remembers. When it can tell a story about itself, imagine the future, touch the stones on which time has left its mark. But we in Ukraine are now at a point of time rupture. Russia wants to convince the world that we will not exist, do not exist, and have never existed. Our Time is out of joint. We hold in our hands the wreckage of the destroyed world we love. We are trying to understand what we must not lose in order to remain ourselves.

Our world is destroyed — it will never return to the point "before the war". Entire cities are physically destroyed — they have ceased to exist. Part of the country has turned into a Wild Field. Where will our memory take root? After all, we cannot even touch some of the places of our memory because they are still in the hands of the enemy. Thus, the focal point of our project is the Mariupol Drama Theater, which was hit by the Russian Army with a bomb in March 2022. The remains of the theater, where hundreds of people died, were first covered with plaques with portraits of Russian writers, before the building was demolished. We are asking ourselves whether the theater will be rebuilt when we return to Mariupol. But is such reconstruction not an immoral act — by restoring the building, one might allege that we are making the crime disappear, as if it never existed. What then should the architecture of commemoration look like?

As long as we live in a time warp, we cannot follow the normal path of commemoration. Our path now is to create an imaginary architecture of memory, to outline the emptiness that cannot be filled. We can build models of the lost world in virtual space. Here and now, Ukrainian memorials cannot be embodied in something tangible. From what should we build? How and where do we draw the contours of what cannot be lost? In this wasteland of a destroyed world, we draw an image of the future with sound. What is more intangible than sound? This is the only way Ukrainian memorials can be today.

In a torn time, memory ceases to be linear. History crumbles into fragments that we hold in our hands and carefully put together into a new whole. What was once in the past appears right in front of our eyes, and we recognize ourselves in a new way, in the mirror of the distant past. The former Wild Field was swept by waves of military clashes, interventions of industrial breakthroughs, the Soviet project of building a "new world" out of "nothing". Against the backdrop of the torn time of this war, we recognize fragments of the past in a new way.

When the war is over, how will we remember everything that happened? Our first commemorative gesture is to talk about what cannot be lost. We do not just cry over our losses. Our feeling is not only grief. It is love and desire for the future. While we are defending our future, our memorials are being built in atopia. Only here do we find a foothold.

The statement on commemoration is the result of a joint interdisciplinary reflection by architects, artists, and researchers of collective memory. The projects presented in the joint statement include spatial research and artistic gestures, united by the search for a language of commemoration of the Russian-Ukrainian War, and an idea of what war memorials are today.

“The Day of Wrath from the Machine”

Sasha Kurmaz

4-channel spatial audio installation, 21 min, 2023

installation created in collaboration with Alexey Shmurak (composition) and Oleksandr Chornyi (sound production)

This art project is the result of the joint reflection of the What Cannot Be Lost collective. What can a memorial be for people who are still in the middle of a war? When the world is collapsing every day, it is impossible to build memorials of marble or bronze. But the work of memory requires the development of an idea of a memorial, at least in an imaginary or virtual space. If the CST proposed a spatial study in a virtual architectural form, and Oleksandr Burlaka imagined a spatial and temporal model, the artist Sasha Kurmaz went the route of creating a memorial beyond the idea of materiality. Sound can carry a powerful message, but it is devoid of materiality. In collaboration with the composer Alexey Shmurak, Kurmaz creates a sound memorial born out of the memory of the genocide and crimes against humanity committed by the Russian Army in Ukraine.

According to Shmurak: “The title of the work refers simultaneously to two well known Latin expressions — Dies Irae (Day of Wrath) and Deus ex Machina (God from the Machine). These expressions have an opposite mood; while the Day of Wrath refers to judgment, punishment, the inevitability of catastrophe, and non-empathy; Deus ex Machina refers to unexpected, miraculous salvation, the intervention of higher forces.”

In a musical composition, this title has a multilayered meaning. Firstly, the sound itself is emphatically artificial, sometimes as if it were a toy, not fully alive; this is how an inanimate being (golem? homunculus? artificial intelligence?) might feel, given the task of being convincing, angry, empathetic, emotionally intelligent.

The sounds of the composition are sometimes threatening and physically striking, sometimes trying to evoke empathy, sometimes soothing and lulling; the music balances between dramatic, comic, and therapeutic effects, but always maintains a certain distance.

In Old Testament mythology, the Day of Wrath is a day of condemnation for some and salvation for others; but is such condemnation and salvation possible in reality? Not unless it involves a "god from a machine," an expression from the professional jargon of screenwriters that means a clumsy attempt by the author to quickly and easily resolve the situation in favor of one of the parties.

In the context of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, occupation crimes, sadism, mass deaths, and destruction of culture, the scale of events, both quantitative and qualitative, is such that it seems to cause psychological and mental trauma even without direct physical intervention. The impossibility, inadmissibility, and inappropriateness of a direct statement gives rise to a specific statement, one that requires additional efforts to experience, perceive, and understand.

The composition ends with a long, calm episode of a therapeutic nature. This is a prediction of inevitable reflection, a long period of trauma treatment and acceptance of the irreversibility of the new reality.

This spatial research project is based on the visualization of several layers of the history of the Ukrainian steppe, which in the Middle Ages was perceived as a Wild Field, a dangerous space in which only armed people could exist, who, in one way or another, built their lives. At the same time, it was the territory of trade routes that were fundamentally important for European history. The first map of this space was created in the 16th century, during the reign of Ivan the Terrible. The project explores old maps that show the Wild Field. On these maps, we recognize the landscape of modern Ukraine.

The Wild Field became a thing of the past when the Industrial Revolution unfolded in these territories. In the 1870s, Scottish businessman John Hughes launched the development of capitalist industry here, which started coal mining and metal production. Later, the Soviet industrialization project was built on this potential.

When we look at the drone footage of the industrialized steppes of the Northern Pryazovia region, and overlay it with maps from the 17th century, we recognize the contours of the same space. All the rivers marked in the 17th century exist on today's maps. Today's traveler has the opportunity to follow the same paths that the people of the 17th century followed.

The historical stratification of roads, rivers, and settlements later became the core of the region's urbanization and coal mining patterns.

The Russian invasion of 2022–2023 suddenly revealed the medieval meanings of the Wild Field on the modern map. In July 2022, Ukrainian photographer and Armed Forces soldier Volodymyr Ianovych filmed the fields of the Kherson region: individual people trying to escape the Russian occupation on foot along a soggy road. Steppe paths and ravines have regained their military meanings.

Oleksandr Burlaka was caught off guard by the thought of how the unchanged landscape he filmed two years ago had radically changed its meaning. The space under the shell of modern infrastructure suddenly reveals the geography and roadmap of centuries of warfare.

Last year, the Theater of Hopes and Expectations in Düsseldorf was created from the discarded remnants of sets from various German theaters. From August to November 2022, repurposed set pieces became the walls for program of talks, exhibitions, screenings, and fundraisers.

Upon the project’s completion, the Theater was dismantled and the materials shipped to Ukraine. On the initiative of the volunteer group Livyj Bereh, it is currently being rebuilt into a new home for the Honchar family in the Kyiv region, whose prior residence was destroyed by the russian tank in the Spring of 2022.

The idea of reuse was further developed in cooperation with the Open for Maintenance project of the German Pavilion at the Architecture Biennale 2023, which uses the leftover exhibition materials from the Biennale Arte 2022 to create social infrastructures in Venice.

At the suggestion of the Prykarpattian Theater, their materials and workshop were also utilized to build the showcase to exhibit artifacts presented by the Theater of Hopes and Expectations in the Ukrainian Pavilion as part of the collective statement What Cannot Be Lost.

The Ukrainian pavilion at the Biennale features documentation of the Theater of Hopes and Expectations project. The project included the creation of the Theater of Hopes and Expectations pavilion from the remains of German theater sets in the Volksgarten Park in Düsseldorf during August–September 2022. The Theater hosted discussions, exhibitions, film screenings, and concerts by Ukrainian authors. After the project was completed, the construction was dismantled and moved to Ukraine. At the initiative of the Livyi Bereh (Left Bank) volunteer group, the Theater is currently being rebuilt into a home for the Honchar family from the village of Sloboda-Kukharska in Kyiv region. Their home was destroyed by a Russian tank in the spring of 2022.

Investigating the attack on the Mariupol Drama Theater, one of the many crimes committed by the Russian army against Mariupol and its communities, the Center for Spatial Technologies collected and analyzed eyewitness accounts, surviving images, information from social media, satellite imagery, and 3D models of the theater. Building upon this plexus of elements, “City in the Theater” offers a look at the building as something more than a target on military radar, instead it becomes an embodiment of the collective memory of the witnesses to the attack. In doing so, it underscores the significance of this crime in the broader context of Russia’s war against Ukraine.

During the exhibition, the film will be complemented by spatial interviews with witnesses, presented for the first time.

This art project is the result of the joint reflection of the What Cannot Be Lost collective. What can a memorial be for people who are still in the middle of a war? When the world is collapsing every day, it is impossible to build memorials of marble or bronze. But the work of memory requires the development of an idea of a memorial, at least in an imaginary or virtual space. If the CST proposed a spatial study in a virtual architectural form, and Oleksandr Burlaka imagined a spatial and temporal model, the artist Sasha Kurmaz went the route of creating a memorial beyond the idea of materiality. Sound can carry a powerful message, but it is devoid of materiality. In collaboration with the composer Alexey Shmurak, Kurmaz creates a sound memorial born out of the memory of the genocide and crimes against humanity committed by the Russian Army in Ukraine.

According to Shmurak: “The title of the work refers simultaneously to two well known Latin expressions — Dies Irae (Day of Wrath) and Deus ex Machina (God from the Machine). These expressions have an opposite mood; while the Day of Wrath refers to judgment, punishment, the inevitability of catastrophe, and non-empathy; Deus ex Machina refers to unexpected, miraculous salvation, the intervention of higher forces.”

In a musical composition, this title has a multilayered meaning. Firstly, the sound itself is emphatically artificial, sometimes as if it were a toy, not fully alive; this is how an inanimate being (golem? homunculus? artificial intelligence?) might feel, given the task of being convincing, angry, empathetic, emotionally intelligent.

The sounds of the composition are sometimes threatening and physically striking, sometimes trying to evoke empathy, sometimes soothing and lulling; the music balances between dramatic, comic, and therapeutic effects, but always maintains a certain distance.

In Old Testament mythology, the Day of Wrath is a day of condemnation for some and salvation for others; but is such condemnation and salvation possible in reality? Not unless it involves a "god from a machine," an expression from the professional jargon of screenwriters that means a clumsy attempt by the author to quickly and easily resolve the situation in favor of one of the parties.

In the context of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, occupation crimes, sadism, mass deaths, and destruction of culture, the scale of events, both quantitative and qualitative, is such that it seems to cause psychological and mental trauma even without direct physical intervention. The impossibility, inadmissibility, and inappropriateness of a direct statement gives rise to a specific statement, one that requires additional efforts to experience, perceive, and understand.

The composition ends with a long, calm episode of a therapeutic nature. This is a prediction of inevitable reflection, a long period of trauma treatment and acceptance of the irreversibility of the new reality.

This spatial research project is based on the visualization of several layers of the history of the Ukrainian steppe, which in the Middle Ages was perceived as a Wild Field, a dangerous space in which only armed people could exist, who, in one way or another, built their lives. At the same time, it was the territory of trade routes that were fundamentally important for European history. The first map of this space was created in the 16th century, during the reign of Ivan the Terrible. The project explores old maps that show the Wild Field. On these maps, we recognize the landscape of modern Ukraine. The Wild Field became a thing of the past when the Industrial Revolution unfolded in these territories. In the 1870s, Scottish businessman John Hughes launched the development of capitalist industry here, which started coal mining and metal production. Later, the Soviet industrialization project was built on this potential.

When we look at the drone footage of the industrialized steppes of the Northern Pryazovia region, and overlay it with maps from the 17th century, we recognize the contours of the same space. All the rivers marked in the 17th century exist on today's maps. Today's traveler has the opportunity to follow the same paths that the people of the 17th century followed.

The historical stratification of roads, rivers, and settlements later became the core of the region's urbanization and coal mining patterns.

The Russian invasion of 2022–2023 suddenly revealed the medieval meanings of the Wild Field on the modern map. In July 2022, Ukrainian photographer and Armed Forces soldier Volodymyr Ianovych filmed the fields of the Kherson region: individual people trying to escape the Russian occupation on foot along a soggy road. Steppe paths and ravines have regained their military meanings.

Oleksandr Burlaka was caught off guard by the thought of how the unchanged landscape he filmed two years ago had radically changed its meaning. The space under the shell of modern infrastructure suddenly reveals the geography and roadmap of centuries of warfare.