What does it mean to "trace" war?

This modular multimedia project traces media discourses about the ongoing crisis in Ukraine and how those discourses are complicated by lived experiences of forced migration in Southeastern Europe. Multimedia artworks about a Jewish family’s history in the region today dissected between Ukraine, Moldova, and Romania illustrate the cyclical nature of crisis in Southeastern Europe. Histories of deportation and forced migration are endemic to the region, often resulting from a seemingly endless redrawing of national border (and, subsequently, national identity), perhaps most commonly associated with the advent and subsequent dissolution of the Soviet Union. Crises of war and occupation are ahistoriziced through representation in popular media, and this project illustrates how popular media functions as an active participant in the purposeful erasure of the region’s complex historical relationship to border and sovereignty. Social media depictions of Vlodoymyr Zelenskyy and Vladimir Putin are particularly potent examples of how sovereignty and national identity can be culturally figured through digital media. 

 One aspect of this modular project traces my grandparents' personal experiences with deportation and forced migration between Romania, Ukraine, Moldova, Khazakstan, and other areas in the Caucuses in the years between 1930 and 1979. Audio recordings of conversations with my grandparents, who are each battling Alzheimer’s and Dementia, are interwoven with fragmented 3D renderings and family photographs. These pieces work in the space between individual and collective memory. These modules also “cut up” the other pieces in this work, which document recent digitally-hosted discourses about the occupation of Ukraine, particularly on Twitter. My grandparents’ experiences of internal displacement have become embodied perhaps even epigenetically — a 2019 study at Boston University’s School of Public Health found a significant link between a rare genetic marker for Alzheimer’s and Ashkenazi Jews. Memory has the ability to both degrade nuance and preserve it; this project explores both aspects of this binary through the comparison of personal memory and collective imaginary. 

Digital media, in its fleeting, rapidly cycling character, offers a flexible dynamic through which to process and iterate culture and, to an increasing extent, to reconstruct how historical events are culturally remembered (which may be easily evidenced in the far right’s staunch commitment to false claims of electoral fraud in the 2020 election). Digital (re)enactments of war, in the case of the occupation in Ukraine, serve to echo, reproduce, and solidify longstanding methods of bordering and exclusion in the region. Digitally represented war reproduces and magnifies spectacles of violence via strategically constructed binaries of oppressor and oppressed. The ongoing and intensifying war in Ukraine evidences the crucial role that digital media plays in the material enactment of the border – digitally iterated narratives of heroism and sovereignty significantly affect material events within armed conflict. Note, here, Elon Musk’s offer to provide free internet access to the entire country of Ukraine, and his subsequent retraction of that offer. Note also his subsequent posts of Nazi imagery on his public twitter account, suggestion that Ukraine cede territory to Russia (also posted on Twitter), and the unprecedented changes to Twitter’s interface and community policies enacted at his behest. 

Ultimately, this project seeks to understand how these disparate elements create a sort of architecture of sovereignty — how is the fantasy of the border affirmed and imagined through digital media? How are the digital personas of major players in the conflict in Ukraine (particularly Zelenskyy and Putin) materially affecting the conflict? And, importantly, how can the lived experiences of people from the region problematize much of the American media that collapses the nuanced and complex histories of the region in order to produce digestible, bite-size content?