Can a Place be Erased?: Affective Remaking of Home in Displaced Communities

• In Event: (Re)Imagining Donbas: Discourses, Representations, and Memory of a Contested Region

Abstract

What is a city? Is it a summary of buildings and infrastructure? Or is it a web of meanings, relationships, and events enacted by its inhabitants? Under regular circumstances, these two realms are securely intertwined; hence, drawing a distinction is unnecessary. But in Donbas, the circumstances are irregular. Such cities as Mariupol, Bakhmut, and Avdiivka, to name just a few, have gone through a violent unmaking, wherein populations were forcibly separated from their living environments, and the environments themselves were physically destroyed. Through ethnographic fieldwork with displaced Donbas residents, this paper explores practices of everyday living and resilience related to space and place in the context of war. It engages with processes that can be described as place unmaking, place remaking, competitive placemaking, and home-grasping. Understood here as a bundle of affective connections to a place, home is not physically enclosed by the walls of a room, an apartment, or a building. Instead, it includes such subtle yet identity-forming entities as the familiar view from the kitchen window or the vibe of a local corner store. Such a sense of home ranges from intimate relationships with a place to those shared within large collectives, such as landmarks and landscapes. In the case of Donbas, one can consider, for instance, shared attachment to the steppe landscape covered with terrikony (slagheaps), as well as shared petrification at its rapid transformation from a landscape of childhood memories to a landscape of death and destruction. Using this approach, the paper takes a close look at the affective and memory work through which the Donbas people maintain their belonging to places that are inaccessible and recreate, in a variety of forms, places that are destroyed.

Author

• Alisa Sopova, Princeton U