Internalizing Displacement

This module also offers a 3D bust of my grandmother’s face, modeled after an old family photo and lifted directly from the multimedia of module 7. Here, however, her face is overlaid with images depicting the areas on Google Maps’s renderings of Ukraine, Moldova, Romania, and Kazakhstan which are compatible with the application’s “street view” tool. This tool generally functions to allow users to digitally walk through cities in first-person view, thanks to user-uploaded street view photos of neighborhoods and cities. The areas that are well-documented enough by Google Maps to offer street view are, notably, primarily the metropolitan areas of these countries. In Moldova, for instance, the vast majority of the country is not accessible via street view – save for its metropolitan center, Chisinau. Also curious to note is the lack of documentation of streets in Ukraine as a whole, particularly when compared to Romania, which is so thoroughly accounted for that practically the entire block of pixels that shape the country are lit up with street view access points. In contrast, the borders of Ukraine are constituted in negative space (it is not-Moldova, not-Romania, not-Belarus, etc). As audio of my grandmother discussing her family’s embodied experiences with deportation, working in labor camps, and religious discrimination (which have been very effectively erased from larger cultural memory) plays, images overlaid on the 3D model of her face oscillate between various renderings of these digitally-walkable areas. Memory is an integral part of how border is experienced, and these borders (digital, cultural, material) are altered through both my Grandmother’s Alzheimer’s-affected memories and what we may call the selective memory of digital mapping software like Google maps. There are swaths of land in these tracings that are digitally “disappeared”—almost out of sight, out of mind.

Audio ALT Text

Mira Lvovsky: My mom used to go to work. It was a collective farm in Kazakhstan. Initially, mom was put on duty to sift the grain. It was all done by hand then, of course. She had to hold a huge round sieve and scoop as much grain as she could hold into it from the ground, and then shake it so all the debris would fall out. It was a most physically demanding job and it was done only by women… all women. And I was going to a camp for a whole week and come home only on weekends. I don’t remember the camp at all but I do remember that to get there I had to cross a small but very deep stream. I was very afraid. My mom would follow me and tell me ‘don’t be afraid. Just jump over it.’ I was holding on to her for dear life and she would essentially throw me over to the other side. One day, we got a notice that my father had died as a hero of some kind, can’t remember which kind, in battle.

Ella Mullenex: I thought he went MIA?

Mira: No, you’re right, it said that he was ‘MIA’ (missing in action) and my mother was grief stricken, very deep grief. But later we got a letter that informed us that he died a hero of the Soviet Union. After that, we were given a small piece of land for a vegetable garden. My mother never knew what a vegetable garden was or what to do with it. Luckily, we had very nice neighbors who liked my mother very much. They gave her some seeds, some potatoes, some other vegetables. They really respected her. And I became the general manager of that garden—it was my responsibility to plow it, to do everything that all adults did in their vegetable gardens—I did all of it as a child. I was about 8 or 9 years old at the time. I was very short in stature but to get to the garden, I had to jump over that little stream, and I was mortally afraid of it. Later, we got a notice and an official invite to move back to Chernovitzi.