of brushwood, reeds, and foil
June 20, 2022
In winter of 2019 I happened to learn about a village, Leikiv, in the Poltava region of Ukraine. The village had a page on Wikipedia, yet it was almost impossible to find in real life. All one could see in the place where it was supposed to be were low hillocks overgrown by grass. I was on a research trip to a neighboring village, Velyki Pereviz, where I visited two artists — a couple who were originally based in Kyiv, and decided to relocate to a remote area in the aftermath of Chernobyl in 1987. They found a small cottage on the hill with a view overlooking abandoned Leikiv. That same year, the village was officially marked as uninhabited by the Ukrainian government.
Tamara and Oleksandr, the artists, told me that the village gradually went into decay as a result of Soviet industrialization policies of the 1920s and 1930s, which enacted a massive forced reorganization of populations to cater to the needs of the planned economy. People were forced to leave their villages and move elsewhere to work in collective farm settlements known as ‘kolkhoz.’ In the 1960s, the last of the remaining settlers left or died; in 1990 — a year before the collapse of the Soviet Union — Leikiv was removed from all formal accounting records and therefore stopped existing on paper. For a while Tamara and Oleksandr were the only visitors of the abandoned houses, from which they collected premodern household tools. As these houses, ‘mazankas’, were made of brushwood and reeds and coated with a mixture of clay, manure, and other organic matter, they eventually mingled with the soil and plants of which they were made. From their house on the hill, the artists have been observing this landscape change subtly for the three subsequent decades.
When meeting Tamara for my research project on landscape painting of the late 80s, I incidentally asked her a question about Chernobyl. Considering that the disastrous event was kept secret from the general public for two weeks, I was asking all of my interviewees if they could in retrospect recall feeling or seeing something unusual on the day of April 26th, 1986, or soon after. Tamara responded that on one of the days soon after the explosion, she was going somewhere north of Kyiv (Chernobyl is located about 150 kilometers away from the capital in that direction). While standing all alone at a bus stop just outside the perimeter of the city, something rather uncanny caught her attention. The wind blew and hit the crowns of trees, but instead of the familiar whispering of the leaves, she heard something different. As if the wind was soughing through foil, not leaves. Later I also collected other accounts of such indirect witnessing— recollections of scenes of something momentary, not immediately visible, which resisted articulation in familiar terms, as if speaking about it did not make much sense even for the tellers.
I do not know yet what to do with all these recollections that seemingly belong to different places, to different bodies, or maybe even non-places and non-events. However accidental, the story of the invisible village placed next to the story of a not-immediately-visible disaster allows me an entry point to think about the multitude of temporalities that exceed our fixation with the singular time of modernity and progress, and the way these other temporalities are recorded through technological mediation, cultural interpretation, narratives, and so on. These temporalities unfold simultaneously in all directions: the one of Tamara and Oleksandr who took the decision to quit urban life and ‘return back to the soil after the catastrophe’. Then there is the one registered within the supposedly idyllic landscape— the temporality of massive, rapid industrialisation that, in the pace of five-year plans, over just a few decades, accelerated to and breached the very extreme limits of technological development. It exhausted the lands, turned them into ruins, some of which – like Leikiv – were annihilated and overgrown. Or it left them toxic and zoned out for years – like Chernobyl – until the circle completed itself, while some forms of life perished, returned or prevailed. There is also the temporality of rupture, where the progressivist narrative of modernity — which, in its Soviet version, is geared towards communism for all but only achievable in the future-to-come — seemingly collapses along with the collapse of the Union and its ideological Utopia. The future, the imagination that structures life in a particular way, was cancelled along with that political structure. So there was a new state, Ukraine, which had to look back into histories that were erased or unwritten, before it could propose any long term future oriented project. And there were the people whose temporality was that of the season, bound to the soil in order to survive the collapse of a heavily industrialized planned economy, and who at the same time needed to figure out their new coordinates in a situation of post-Soviet inertia and the sweeping promises of forthcoming capitalist economy. Literally, soil was the only trustworthy companion for the Ukrainian people: the 1990s was the time of gardens, yet never in the romantic sense. When I think of time back then, I rather see it going backwards in relation to progress, and, however strange it might sound, downwards — through relation with the soil as a sort of a temporal structure. There might not be a narrative for these other temporalities. Their traces might be removed from the accounting records, or reinscribe themselves on mediums that are yet to be read or communicated — like the village of Leikiv or the memory of foil-sounding leaves. So I collect this mosaic of scenes to think of them as indexes of records that are stretched in time, subtle, and not quite perceptible — illegible within the narrative matrix of linear, Western catastrophic time.
There is no shortage of apocalyptic scenarios and expectations of end-times in Eurocentric thought: from Christian dogmas to technopoetic speculations. In the latter, technology is both a tool of progress, a doomsday device, and a remedy —a neo-Promethean promise of solving the crisis through the very techniques which precipitated it, like geoengineering. Here, paradoxically, the idea that technological modernity is already a victory over the apocalypse promised by religious thought sits parallel to another idea: the same modernity guarantees that the catastrophe (like the Cold War doctrine of mutually assured destruction) lies ahead but can be postponed, if not averted, no matter how high the cost. So, catastrophe is both in the past and in the future. And even if it is not already happening, the apocalypse is always already real. It is part of a sociotechnical imaginary that mobilizes not just how the present moment is theorized, but the very way it is constructed. Intentionally or not, the ever-expanding discussion about both the future of humanity or the exit out of this project revolves around this pendent figure of the catastrophe. And the propositions are: to prevent, to resist, to inhabit. Or maybe outsource it elsewhere — to places or bodies that are not exactly developed or not exactly human — to zone it out, like in Chernobyl, where all fears can be confined and contained.
According to the logic above, it is tempting to say that here in Ukraine, these are lands, bodies, living and non-living matters where the catastrophe has always already happened many times. However I find myself resisting the vocabulary of catastrophe, not just because there is no division between an idyllic ‘before’ and the catastrophic ‘after’. A catastrophe — a promise or premonition that is either to be fulfilled, postponed, or canceled — is a fantasy that is convenient, yet it does not do justice to the multiple temporalities that I noted. It perpetuates narrative mechanisms that prioritize particular world orders over others. It also perpetuates a hypothetical mode of living and the privilege of speculative thinking, which are far removed from myriad processes that may remain unnamed and unrecorded, that inscribe themselves in ways that require the work of careful translation; or that might be seen, known, and vocal but left intentionally ignored from the conversation. You need time, attention, strength, curiosity, and a lot – really a lot – of labor of witnessing in order to engage with these processes. But once you begin, you find yourself busy with layering all these stories and defending life thriving through toxic ruins. And you realize soon that the notion of catastrophe – a rhetorical exercise based on fears and melancholia – is quite inadequate and passé.