Military occupation, partial de-occupation, large-scale shelling, expectations and beginnings of a Ukrainian counteroffensive, and the Kakhovka hydroelectric power plant disaster have deepened the concept of the Ukrainian South. Over the course of the Russian invasion, the region has become a space of humanitarian catastrophe, destruction, and global food crisis, as fertile lands have been destroyed and the region’s biosphere has been poisoned. The Ukrainian South has also symbolized grief and courage, exhaustion and freedom. Yet this is not the first time in the recent past that the region’s identity has been questioned and reframed. In 2021, there was a public competition to design a monument in Melitopol to commemorate the victims of the human-made famines (Holodomor) that took place in Ukraine between 1932–33. Due to the Russian invasion, the competition was not well publicized, and the winning project has yet to be realized. Yet, its archives serve as a vital case study for ongoing and future war commemoration initiatives.1
The competition was developed by representatives of the local community and Melitopol's leadership in cooperation with the Foundation for Preservation of the Historical and Cultural Heritage of Ukraine.2 After preliminary research and a joint trip to the city, the expert council selected a shortlist of five artists and collectives who developed and presented proposals for memorials on the designated site: a small semi-abandoned green area in the old part of town, next to the local history museum and city council.3 Among them, Daniil Shumikhin’s The Column (all proposals 2021) was recommended for implementation. In the spring of 2022, the preparatory stage of construction was scheduled to begin, and its opening was scheduled for November. But since February 26, 2022, Melitopol has been occupied by Russian troops.
All five projects that were developed for the Melitopol memorial position these man-made famines as both a cornerstone of Ukraine’s twentieth-century historical narrative and one of the hotly contested issues in the long struggle over the historical record with Russia (which has never recognized the Holodomor as an act of genocide). Today, the events of ninety years ago are painfully close and vividly realistic. Stolen grain, poisoned earth, and targeted attacks against the Ukrainian population are all unfolding in territories that experienced similar acts of violence in the past. The themes and images that the five artists worked with in their Melitopol Holodomor memorial proposals can, therefore, be read as themes and images of the ongoing war. In other words, these projects memorialize not only the past but also the present, which will soon become a fact of history.
Until recently, there had been few initiatives in Ukraine (especially state-financed ones) that would engage contemporary artists in commemorative endeavors. Within this context, the Melitopol initiative stands out as an attempt to establish new practices of commemoration. In their mature approach to complex questions of memory, trauma, loss, and their correspondence with the present day, the artists convinced the city government and the project’s private sponsors that research-based methods are more vital than purely aesthetic ones. This diverges from previous (post-)Soviet monumental traditions, which perpetuate visual clichés without looking into the essence of the events and issues they were dedicated to. In the case of commemorating the Holodomor, the vast majority of existing monuments in Ukraine reproduced a limited set of symbols, such as granite millstones or bronze sheaves of rye. Such a plastic language was not far removed from the traditions of Soviet mass-produced sculpture. The Melitopol competition, however, sought for a new image by immersing artists in the context and multi-layered history of the city.
Daniil Shumikhin’s proposal, The Column, features a laconic and precise image: a pseudo-antique column standing alone in the middle of the park. Shumikhin’s column excavates several layers of Melitopol’s history, as well as its contemporary agricultural identity. The first impression it gives is that of a classical Corinthian column, which hints at the ancient roots of the Ukrainian South.4 Upon closer inspection, the column’s capital is revealed to contain stylized vegetables and ears of wheat; an ironic allusion to the clichéd, but accurate, idea of the Melitopol region’s fertile and productive land. Above all, however, the proposal is a reference to the Soviet architecture that dominates the historical center of the city. The abundance of massive, sometimes poorly executed columns—a prominent element of Stalinist architecture—was Shumikhin’s initial inspiration. He proposed a lonely, bulky column that supports nothing and is deprived of its function. With its disproportionality and roughness, it is a ruin of a column that weighs heavily on the city and its citizens. It stands as a symbol of totalitarian pressure, but also its historical doom. Made of cast iron, the column is supposed to rust and slowly become a symbol of a dead regime.
In The Contaminated Fountain Vitaliy Kokhan combines two themes: fertile land and the corrupt political will that led to its exhaustion in the 1930s. At the center of the proposal is a deliberately enlarged plough made of metal and concrete. It bites into a solid concrete platform and gives rise to a barely noticeable gutter through which a stream of water flows. An electrochemical process where the metal and water meet corrodes the metal and visually “pollutes” the water. As the stream flows, however, the corrosion settles at the bottom and the water becomes clear at the end of the gutter. Kokhan offers a metaphor of a wound that does not heal. He also emphasizes the impossibility of fully comprehending the depth of the trauma from this tragedy.
Lia Dostlieva and Andrii Dostliev’s proposal emphasizes that the trauma of the Holodomor is present in our postmemory, daily practices, and worldview.5 The artists proposed to arrange a space where the community could perform rituals of remembrance. At the same time, the space would remain open for other events, such as meetings and poetry readings, which community representatives requested.6 At the center of this space is a symbolic table, which can be read beyond the purely rural and religious connotations usually featured in Holodomor memorials. It also includes ears of wheat, a key element of the established iconography of the Holodomor. However, the ears here are not bronze or stone, but living and needing care. The idea was that the city’s community would plant and harvest them every year, symbolically celebrating life and the impossibility of the tragedy repeating itself.
Instead of a specific image or object, Pavlo Kovach wanted to create a particular state, a situation in which passersby would find themselves. To realize this idea, Kovach—in collaboration with Replus bureau—proposed the creation of an artificial hill and a recreation area pierced by an arc-shaped passage. The hill was to be created using rammed earth, which references chernozem, the source of the fertility of Melitopol’s land. Visitors would see this multi-layered material when walking through the passage, as if looking into the bowels of the landscape. The key element of the proposal was the gradual movement or “breathing” of the perfectly manicured lawn. The idea of such a minimal but eerie movement references the mass graves during the Holodomor. According to testimonies, the earth on fresh mass graves sometimes moved due to organic processes or the last physical efforts of those who were buried unconscious.
The proposal by Yarema Malashchuk and Roman Khimei departs from a portrait of the Kyrychenko family taken in a local photo studio, in which a mother and her three children stand by a coffin containing her youngest son, a four-year-old. This photo, visual evidence of the death of her son from starvation, was taken for his father, who was serving a prison sentence on the White Sea Canal at the time. The artists proposed to organize the park as a recreational and gathering area for townspeople, with many irregularly arranged benches and a mesh cover through which grass and plants would grow. A transparent monolithic stele would contain a small photo of the Kyrychenko family. This careful, visually discrete, but undeniable testimony to the catastrophe serves as both a concrete document and a universal symbol at the same time. The emphasis placed on the customs of this kind of necrological documentation prompts reflection on the importance of private documentary evidence for history; something that is especially important today.
Conclusion
All of the projects developed for the Melitopol Holodomor memorial competition resurface the sounds of the past—a past we are not always ready to hear through the thickness of time. To talk about the past and to be heard, we need to fine tune our ears and our vocal cords to the present. Each proposal created distinct and powerful images, ones that can be embodied and materialized in postwar Ukraine, alive, rooted in local landscapes, and woven into collective memories:
A rusty totalitarian column.
A plough that bleeds the overploughed land.
Mounds that hide life and death.
Wheat sprouting through the efforts of the community.
Photography as a desire to testify to the truth.
An earlier version of this text was published in Ukrainian, see: “південь виснаження,” Past / Future / Art, July 17, 2023, ➝.
“Holodomor Memorial in Melitopol,” Past / Future / Art, ➝.
The invited expert council of the competition featured Iryna Miroshnykova and Oleksii Petrov of FORMA, Kateryna Semenyuk, Nazar Bilyk, and Lizaveta German.
Serhii Plokhy, The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine (New York: Basic Books, 2015).
"Postmemory" is a concept developed by American researcher Marianne Hirsch to denote the kind of collective ideas about the past that are formed by the second generation after a catastrophic experience, at the "break" of collective memory. See Hirsch’s The Generation of Postmemory Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust (New York” Columbia university Press, 2012).
It is important to point out that this community is multicultural: both in the past and today Melitopol has been home to many ethnic groups—Ukrainians, Crimean Tatars, Jews, Germans, Russians, and others—who coexisted peacefully and suffered equally during the Holodomor.
