The Personal in the Shadow of War

Exploring the personal histories of my family illustrates the violence imbued throughout this “architecture of sovereignty” and rejects the archetypal portrayals of Ukrainian vs. Russian national identity utilized by global media outlets throughout the war. Ukraine and Russia maintain an entangled history—culturally, linguistically, and geographically. My mother’s family typically traces their roots to Moldova, though this is perhaps the most simplified retelling of their histories. My grandfather and grandmother, recently diagnosed (respectively) with Dementia and Alzheimer’s, have lived through at least four expulsions between the 1920s and 1970s (that they can remember)—from Romania and Ukraine to Bessarabia (modern-day Moldova) at the rise of the Soviet Union, from Bessarabia to Kazakhstan during WWII, from Kazakhstan back to what later was named Chisinau, Moldova at the close of the Holocaust, and from the center of Chisinau to the city’s outskirts in the 1960s. The archetypal propaganda about Jewish communities that Russian governing bodies produced and circulated via popular media cannot be understated in these histories of forced, internal displacement. The “statelessness” of the Jewish community of the region is directly correlated to ideologies of sovereignty and actualizations of the ever-expanding Russian border. 

Interviews with my grandparents and digital renderings of old family photographs here attempt to preserve the intersections of their identities that reject binary categorization. These embodied histories are complicated via my grandparents' diagnoses with Alzheimer's and Dementia—there is an element of "forgetting" which underlies these stories. As such, the 3D renderings offered above are sometimes "missing" pieces, hollow and see-through. Any effort to preserve these memories digitally, as with all other digitally rendered depictions of war, partake in a sort of flattening process, wherein nuance is necessarily disregarded in favor of archetypal narrative (which may be likened to the binary code that many forms of digital media emerge from). There is a sense of illegibility here that is important to acknowledge and honor visually, both within my grandparents’ own memories and within the far more complex and much larger networks of violence that make up war itself. The crisis in Ukraine is illogical, as is all human suffering, and particularly the suffering which results from war. To attempt to render this occupation within the binary lens of digital media is already always a failing project; this piece instead aims to identify a small selection of the microscopic and endless nodes which make up networks of national sovereignty, violence, and warfare.