De-Occupying the Archive: Art as Liberatory Practice

• In Event: Infrastructures of Liberation II: Resistance, Reconstruction, and De-Occupation in the Ukrainian Commons

Abstract

If as Achille Mbembe reminds us archives are infrastructures of colonial epistemic violence, Soviet industrial archives in Ukraine deal in specialist kinds of epistemic imperialism. Doubling as the dominant institutions of memory in many Ukrainian ‘monotowns,’ industrial archives, and the celebratory words and images of extractivist practice they contain, manifest as the institutionalised and thus ‘authoritative’ meaning of these places. This epistemic reduction can be understood as what Asiya Bazdyrieva calls the ‘resourcification’ of Ukraine, its reduction in the economic and cultural imaginaries to a set of resources to be plundered and exchanged for profit. This ‘resourcifying’ logic continues to power Russia’s war against Ukraine, in which the country, including the heavily industrialised East, is diminished to a non-agential commodity to be controlled and exchanged. The looting and destruction of archives, libraries, and museums is part of Russia’s continuing campaign to control Ukraine’s epistemic infrastructures, asserting hegemony over the meaning of its cultural space.This paper looks at the ways in which artists from Ukraine have resisted (re-)colonial epistemic violence, through engaging industrial archives, confronting and dismantling their infrastructures of epistemic occupation. De-occupying archives through critical reworkings of archival photography and video, Oleksandr Kuchynskyi, Anna Pylypyuk & Volodymyr Shypotilnikov, Kateryna Syrik, Elias Parvulesko and Sashko Protyah, among others, raise questions about archival knowledge, epistemic violence and the liberatory potential of contemporary art practice. Considering my own work with the Center of Urban History on the ‘City in a Suitcase’ project, I ask how archives of the occupied and destroyed territories, including heavily industrialised spaces such as Mariupol, Sieverodonetsk, and Soledar, can be reconstituted through community-led practice, resisting the recreation of ‘resourcifying’ archival politics and instead setting free alternative world perceptions (Tlostanova, 2019).

Author

• Victoria Donovan, U of St Andrews (UK)