Reconstruction - e-flux

Editors Daša Anosova, Nick Axel, Nikolaus Hirsch, Michał Murawski, Dan Jonas Roche, Kateryna Rusetska

Contributors Ievgeniia Gubkina, Kateryna Iakovlenko, Galyna Sukhomud, Luke Cooper, Joanna Kusiak, Oleksandr Kravchuk, Simon Johnson, Vladyslav Rashkovan, Yuliya Yurchuk, Oleksandr Anisimov, and more…

How is it possible to envision rebuilding when the field is in a constant state of flux? How long will it take until any strategy proposed is rendered obsolete? What value can scholars offer when war, destruction, and resistance are still underway and there is no end in sight?

Reconstruction is a project by e-flux Architecture drawing from and elaborating on Ukrainian Hardcore: Learning from the Grassroots, the eighth annual Construction festival held in the Dnipro Center for Contemporary Culture on November 10–12, 2023 (2024), and “The Reconstruction of Ukraine: Ruination, Representation, Solidarity,” a symposium held on September 9–11, 2022 organized by Sofia Dyak, Marta Kuzma, and Michał Murawski, which brought together the Center for Urban History, Lviv; Center for Urban Studies, Kyiv; Kyiv National University of Construction and Architecture; Re-Start Ukraine; University College London; Urban Forms Center, Kharkiv; Yale University; and Visual Culture Research Center, Kyiv (2023).

View Grid

View List

18 essays

Weaving Future Statehood

Yuliya Yurchenko

Decades of socio-economic difficulties, waves of diasporic migration, and more than ten years of Russian invasion have presented Ukrainians with overlapping challenges that have been insufficiently met by the state and market alike.

Water, Air, Earth, Obstacle?

Beauty Studio

After the invasion of Ukraine, many cultural practitioners and artists were faced with the question of how to be useful and help our country in its struggle against Russia. We personally found the answer to this question when we arrived in Mykolaiv to volunteer.

On the Road

Tania Pashynska and Yuliia Holiuk

A man opened the door with an ax. We were laughing and wanted to film it, but he said, “Better not.” The building was previously a sports school, so the rooms were filled with boys’ sneakers.

A Center De-Centered

Kateryna Rusetska, Alina Stamenova, and Andrii Palash

The benches on Katerynoslavskyi Boulevard are gray and cold. We sit on this granite, not particularly afraid of catching a cold, laughing a lot and discussing plans for the future. It is October 2013: one month before the beginning of Euromaidan in Kyiv, which would quickly spread to Dnipro and the rest of Ukraine. It is also the beginning of Kultura Medialna.

Building for the Medium Term

Sofia Pinedo-Padoch

Traveling into, around, and out of Ukraine, to the factory where the housing modules are built and to the region where the modules are delivered and installed, my thoughts kept returning to the theme of mobility, to the freedom to move.

Piece by Piece

Ada Wordsworth and Kseniia Kalmus

About six months after we started working there, a friend who was still volunteering in Przemysl met a family from Slatyne who were returning from Germany because they had heard people were doing repairs in the village.

Editorial: Hardcore Diaries

Michał Murawski, Kateryna Rusetska, and e-flux Architecture

Not merely since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, but since the start of its invasion, occupation, and obliteration of Ukrainian territory in 2014, Ukrainian grassroots reconstruction initiatives have sifted through, cleared up, and re-used bricks, rubble, and ruined matter.

Restitutions: A Roundtable

Joanna Kusiak, Oleksandr Kravchuk, Simon Johnson, Vladyslav Rashkovan, and Denise Ferreira da Silva

We all are now witnessing what globalization is all about. We realize that our degree of interdependence is such that it is not only our shared humanity that makes us care about what’s happening to the population of Ukraine, but also our daily lives, sometimes in painful ways.

Comparison and Its Discontents

Gruia Bădescu

Amidst these ongoing debates and reconstruction efforts, past experiences of rebuilding are continuously being invoked. There are comparisons being made not just with reconstruction precedents, but also with regard to the war itself. Reconstruction is indeed often linked to the type of war fought, the levels of destruction, the impact on cities, the morale and cultures of memory connected to it.

Non-Exigent Spaces

Polina Baitsym

Narratives that brashly equate “Soviet” with “russian” have been noxiously amplified both within and beyond Ukraine since the beginning of russia's full-scale invasion. These narratives are complicit in the obliteration of Ukraine’s twentieth-century cultural heritage, which was already threatened by the indiscriminate process of decommunization and scornful ambitions of urban developers.

Narratives of Destruction

Ammar Azzouz and Ievgeniia Gubkina

Allowing myself to talk personally is something that’s helped me a lot during wartime. I’ve had to lean on these emotions, on the belief that it’s okay to feel all these things. It’s really difficult to allow yourself to go through such a traumatic experience and try to understand, to feel everything.

Spatial Planning in the Face of Crisis

Oleksandr Anisimov

These numbers are immense. Where the funds to rebuild will come from and in what form (loans, investments, grants) are questions of great importance. But of equal importance are the questions of what gets rebuilt, where, when, and how.

Resistance, Rebuilding, Resilience

Yuliya Yurchuk

Lost lives cannot be rebuilt. The human psyche and culture has, however, developed mechanisms to cope with loss. This is the work of the living to mourn and remember. But the lives of the dead will be never repaired. Reparation is a gift to the living, those who can repair and reconstruct their lives and their environments.

Restitutions: Appropriation, Expropriation, Regulation

Luke Cooper, Joanna Kusiak, Oleksandr Kravchuk, Simon Johnson, and Vladyslav Rashkovan

The expert panel and open roundtable "Restitutions: Appropriation, Expropriation, Regulation" was held on September 11, 2022 as part of the international symposium "The Reconstruction of Ukraine." An edited transcript of the panel is below, and a transcript of the roundtable which followed will be published separately.

The Pain of Ruins: On Urban Trauma and Collective Healing

Galyna Sukhomud

Through the systemic protracted destruction of networks and connections between bodies, places, and things, trauma gains a “collective, spatial, and material dimension.” This trauma, or rather multiple traumas, is also emplaced in the urban fabric, as cities and the urban way of life has become a particular target of attacks in attempts of what can be called “forced demodernization.”

Flavors of Freedom: Rethinking the late 1980s and early 1990s

Kateryna Iakovlenko

It was the summer of 1989. Residents of Fergana, one of the largest cities in what was then the Uzbek SSR, brought carefully picked garden fruits, vegetables, and herbs to the bazaar, their sweet-spicy smells beckoning. Cats crawled around, trying to get any kind of attention. Locals and tourists alike flocked to the square.

The Right to Prosecute: On Russia’s War Crimes Against Ukrainian Cultural Heritage

Ievgeniia Gubkina

As the most social, eternal, and solid form of heritage, architecture is also the most vulnerable and fragile during the war. It’s impossible to protect it.

Editorial

e-flux Architecture, Daša Anosova, Michał Murawski, and Dan Jonas Roche

Subject

Architecture, Ukraine, Politics

Contributors

Yuliya Yurchenko Weaving Future Statehood
Beauty Studio Water, Air, Earth, Obstacle?
Tania Pashynska and Yuliia Holiuk On the Road
Kateryna Rusetska and Andrii Palash A Center De-Centered
Sofia Pinedo-Padoch Building for the Medium Term
Ada Wordsworth and Kseniia Kalmus Piece by Piece
Michał Murawski and e-flux Architecture Editorial: Hardcore Diaries
Joanna Kusiak, Oleksandr Kravchuk, Simon Johnson and Denise Ferreira da Silva Restitutions: A Roundtable
Gruia Bădescu Comparison and Its Discontents
Polina Baitsym Non-Exigent Spaces
Ammar Azzouz and Ievgeniia Gubkina Narratives of Destruction
Oleksandr Anisimov Spatial Planning in the Face of Crisis
Yuliya Yurchuk Resistance, Rebuilding, Resilience
Luke Cooper, Joanna Kusiak, Oleksandr Kravchuk and Vladyslav Rashkovan Restitutions: Appropriation, Expropriation, Regulation
Galyna Sukhomud The Pain of Ruins: On Urban Trauma and Collective Healing
Kateryna Iakovlenko Flavors of Freedom: Rethinking the late 1980s and early 1990s
Ievgeniia Gubkina The Right to Prosecute: On Russia’s War Crimes Against Ukrainian Cultural Heritage
e-flux Architecture, Daša Anosova and Dan Jonas Roche Editorial

Category

Subject