Where did the sea come from?

Anastasiia Omelianiuk

Going from Kyiv to my mother’s native land, a village in the Cherkasy region, we used to take a road that ran like a thin ribbon across the endless dark blue water body. I have always been fascinated by these enormous reservoirs and this overarching lake called the “Cherkasy Sea”. As a child, I knew that Ukraine had two seas in the South, far away from where I live. This is why this mysterious Cherkasy Sea—in the middle of Ukraine—would leave my mind restless. My mum explained to us that this sea is artificial and man-made, but she did not give much detail. In the late summers, adults would glance at the river wistfully and warn us against swimming in Dnipro. Swimming was discouraged because of the “Dnipro blooming”—when the entire lake surface is draped in lime-green foggy seaweed covers. What is “blooming” is not the river, but cyanobacteria that poison the water with algae decay products such as ammonia and cyanide. Adults would often say that the blooming never happened before the Cherkasy Sea was created.

I always wanted to know more. Why did they do it? What was there before? Later in life, when unhindered access to the internet blessed our lives, I found a few scarce articles explaining that to create the sea, the Soviet government decided to flood thousands of kilometres of land. I could not believe it: how many towns, villages, hamlets were gone? What happened to the people from those areas? My mum grew up gazing at the Cherkasy “Sea”, but she did not know the answers to these questions.

My journey to Cherkasy takes me through Kaniv. I visited Kaniv as my fascination with the region evolved into a more systematic study—I am an anthropologist. In this small city on the banks of the Dnipro, which I had never had a chance to experience before beyond the modernist sign on the highway, I do ethnographic research with a small but inspiring community of volunteers. Here, the mystery of man-made “seas” finds me again. Ironically, I first introduced myself to this city in June 2024, right after Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Zakharova claimed that Kyiv was preparing to destroy the dams of the Kyiv Hydroelectric Power station of the Kaniv Reservoir. This was part of a Russian disinformation campaign that aimed at causing panic among Ukrainians. Many feared that Russia would actually carry out such an attack and blame it on the Ukrainian army.

Kaniv Reservoir is one of the six (including “The Cherkasy Sea”) that comprise the Dnipro Cascade—a series of dams, reservoirs and hydroelectric power stations on the Dnipro River. These six giants were beacons of Soviet technological progress and indispensable tools of the USSR’s “modernisation” and “industrialisation” propaganda. Kaniv Reservoir is the youngest, so some older people who still live on its bank were witnesses and victims of the grand projects of “conquering Dnipro”.

Olga, a volunteer from Kaniv, agreed to share with me her experience of forceful relocation due to the flooding of the land in the 1970s:

“When our village was being destroyed, they showed us how it would be. They showed us a film by Dovzhenko called “Poem About the Sea”, made in 1958. Maybe you can look it up, but I can’t watch it. It depicts such a tragedy. They [the film] showed us new buildings, how beautiful they were, and how young people were driving around, singing songs. And, in the old village, they [the film] showed us old women crying. These old women were saying “we won’t let go, we won’t let go”. But the head of the Kolkhoz persuaded them; he said everything would be fine. No village, but everything is fine?

“Poem about the Sea” is the final, unfinished masterpiece of Oleksandr Dovzhenko’s genius. He passed away while working on it, and his wife Yulia Solntseva completed the film. Dovzhenko’s art was continuously influenced by the poetic critiques of anthropocentric thinking, for which he had to apologise to the party and “correct” his behaviour, disloyal to Soviet ideas. I saw fragments of the film that terrified Olga as part of the exhibition The River Wailed Like a Wounded Beast, which I will discuss in this essay. Analysing the exhibition’s power to make one cry for the battered river, I will question Soviet colonial legacies and their enduring impact on the human and non-human. Additionally, I invite the reader to think about the healing of traumas that were previously taboo and the potential for developing a language to address them.

Civilising subjugated landscapes

In the name of “building socialism” the Soviet government embarked on large-scale industrialisation. This involved mass electrification, urban development and, most importantly, the expansion of heavy industry. These grand projects, traversing the vast expanses of the USSR, were predominantly conceived in and directed from Moscow1. This top-down approach often resulted in decisions that lost their logic and coherence as they travelled thousands of kilometres to their destinations. These remote lands, with their diverse languages, religions, landscapes, and ways of life, differed profoundly from those in the political centre.

The object of my childhood yearning, the mysterious underwater terrain covered by the Cherkasy Sea, is called the Kremenchuk Water Reservoir. It is one of the six water reservoirs built on the Dnipro River and completed in 1961 to power the Kremenchuk Hydroelectric Power Station (in Ukrainian, HES). The colossal basin is 2250 km² big, an area larger than Amsterdam and the modern New Amsterdam or New York City combined.

Each project required thousands of kilometres of land to be flooded. It was not barren land but hundreds of centuries-old villages, towns and hectares of fertile soil, old-growth forests, lakes and meadows that formed the basis of the district’s agriculture2. Each basin that shredded Ukraine’s blue artery—the Dnipro River—is a heartbreaking example of the Party-programme-serving industrialisation projects that proved so woefully detrimental on many levels.3

Olga from Kaniv reminisces that before the last reservoir was created, one could drink water from the Dnipro and see its inhabitants in its crystal waters.

The colossal destruction of the river, the erosion of its banks, and the inundation of entire ecosystems led to environmental disasters that continue to this day, even after the systems and individuals responsible, together with their promises to “bring a communist future”, are long gone. The flooding has devastated floodplains, caused fish die-offs, and led to the phenomenon known as the “Dnipro bloom”. This seemingly poetic term describes a devastating reality: algae thriving in toxic abundance, poisoning the water with products of decay like ammonia and cyanide. Once-pure streams are now polluted, deciding the fate of a fragile ecosystem.

Thousands of historical and archaeological monuments were submerged, including seven out of the eight little-studied Zaporizhia Sich sites (fortified settlements of Ukrainian polity that existed between the 16th and 18th centuries). This could have been avoided if the builders had fully implemented the project and built a protective dam to protect the area from flooding.

The creation of the Dnipro hydroelectric cascades clearly manifested the gigantomania of the era of the “great construction projects of communism”. The area flooded during the construction of the hydroelectric power plants was 6,000 km² large. In total, up to three million people from different villages, towns and regions had to get up and leave. Before that, they were forced to destroy their houses and vast vegetable plots and cut down apple and pear trees that had been feeding their families for decades.4

It was not only Dnipro that was forced to “work for communism”. Latvia’s Daugava River also had to face the fate of “Sovietisation”. The construction of the Pļaviņas Hydroelectric Power Station involved flooding large areas. The project, which faced significant resistance from the Latvian people (largely ignored by the state), resulted in ecological damage, the forceful displacement of communities, the destruction of their homes, and the submersion of natural treasures. Latvia’s cultural symbols—a site of a cross-country pilgrimage, the “crying” Staburags limestone cliff, and the 13th-century Latvian Koknese Castle—were forever lost in the sea created to power steel and concrete representations of Soviet “greatness”.

While the Soviet authorities “gifted” Ukraine and Latvia with man-made “seas”, they took away the bountiful, seemingly infinite, fourth-largest lake in the world from the Karakalpaks in the semi-autonomous republic of Uzbekistan. The Aral Sea began its tragic decline in the 1960s when Soviet authorities diverted water from the two main rivers that once nourished it, channelling them to irrigate vast cotton fields. As the water receded, salt concentrations soared, turning the once-thriving sea into a lifeless, toxic desert.5 The Soviet regime knew they were sacrificing the Aral Sea for their agrarian “development” plans. Long before the Russian Empire refashioned itself into the USSR, Aleksandr Voeikov labelled the Karakalpak treasure, the Aral Sea, a “useless evaporator” and a “mistake of nature”. Despite the calculated sacrifices, the Soviet government, focused on developing the cotton industry in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, failed to anticipate the devastating consequences. Herbicides and pesticides from the new fields leached into the rivers and, ultimately, into the Aral Sea itself.6

The distortions of the Aral Sea, Daugava River and Dnipro River took place in the faraway corners of the communist “empire” and spanned different decades. However, they are all connected by many invisible yet substantial threads of top-down Soviet decision-making. It prioritised centralised “development” and “modernisation” over the interests and livelihoods of the local population, which devastated the regions from an environmental, economic, cultural, and health perspective.

Who needed civilisation, who needed Sovietisation?

Can we discuss the anthropogenic origins of these enormous, grotesque, life-altering transformations without considering the complex power imbalances at play? Soviet projects were not only aimed at bringing civilisation to the “empty” lands; it seems that they were determined to build the new Soviet order on the graves of the “non-Soviet”, non-Russian heritage and ways of living. Oleksandr Dovzhenko wrote in his memoir about the first HES of the Dnipro cascade: “The sea was born, endless, with an immense horizon. A geological miracle! At the bottom of which childhood sank forever.”

When we examine these top-down water politics, we cannot discuss them from an environmental perspective alone. Ecological catastrophes are significant puzzles in the convoluted yet explicitly authoritarian and extractive relationship between the metropole and the periphery. However, it is crucial to understand the intricate yet horrifying mechanism behind the relationship of domination between the Soviet centre and the borderlands, which needed to be “civilised”.

Sovietisation, marketed as “bringing civilisation”, which was often aided by mass Russification, was dependent on a centralised erasure of differences, ethnicities, cultures, worldviews and traditions in the name of the “union of nations”, of a “new Soviet man”. National Soviet policies evolved over time.7 There were brief periods of “ethnophilic” political manipulation, where limited ethnic celebration was allowed, but only within the boundaries set by the Russian metropole. This was followed by consistent forcible displacements across the Soviet Empire, the artificial redrawing of regional borders between ethnicities and nationalities, and the forced transfer of Indigenous, non-literate languages from one alphabet to another.

In 1932, a massive opening ceremony with journalists from around the world took place to mark the completion of the first of the Dnipro Cascade Power Plants—Dniprohez. As the grand feast celebrated defeating the river to “serve communism”, people in the nearby villages (and across different regions in the young state) were swelling and dying of starvation.8 In the same year, after the state accelerated the pace of grain procurement, villages were simply unable to meet the quota. Many workers who came to take part in the construction were actually escaping the beginning of Holodomor, the genocide of 1932–33. Soviet industrialisation and modernisation were carried out not despite but through colossal human sacrifice.

Let’s look at our surroundings, at the land and water that carries us through James Lovelock’s poetic Gaia Hypothesis. Gaia—our Earth—is a living, breathing, changing organism; it shifts humans, and humans shift it. Brazilian thinker and activist Ailton Krenak9 argues that environmental crises stem from the flawed belief that humans are superior to nature and entitled to exploit it. This anthropocentric mindset has led to a civilisation built on systems that disconnect us from the natural world. Krenak argues that there is no point in speculating about the end of the world—Indigenous peoples in the Americas have already endured that multiple times. His works make me think of other people in other parts of the world who have witnessed the end of the world. Who lived through it, yet were not even allowed to talk about it.

This relationship of domination that was exercised through industrialisation and “taming nature” has little to do with theories of socialism or communism. Thinking of the Soviet desire to modernise the “uncivilised”, to transform roaring rivers and a bountiful lake into “work for communism” and to sacrifice one’s life in the name of the Soviet Industrial Revolution, one must consider how colonial domination operates.

These interventions dramatically destroyed the way people shared their lives with their native and spiritual landscapes for centuries. The dimensions of these anthropocentric and empire-centric relationships can only be comprehended and processed if one considers all aspects of it—the cultural, spiritual, ecological, and historical. Most importantly, upon examining the ways of life forever distorted by Soviet colonial relations—from those who lived along the banks of the Dnipro and Daugava Rivers to those whose families were nurtured by the Aral Sea—it’s crucial to understand that mechanisms of colonial relationships today cannot be fully grasped solely through a critique of modernity and power dynamics shaped by Western perspectives. We must seek for answers beyond established regions, formulas and examples to understand what is wrong across diverse regions in the world. We must do so to have a chance for building a caring, supportive, nurturing way of co-existing on our bruised Earth.

Cinema of the Roaring Waters

Imperial interventions can exercise their domination in an ironic way, ruthlessly perpetuating the suffering of the people. The Kahovka Dam, one of the Dnipro River cascades, epitomised the Soviet victory of civilisation over rural, “pre-Soviet” life. In the 21st century, it once again played a major role in establishing dominance: the former metropole attacked “its periphery” by destroying what it once erected on the flooded land.

These interventions might look different “on paper”—in the eyes of international criminal courts or critical thinkers. Yet the historic events of both erecting and blowing up the Kahovka Dam are entangled in the continuum of Russian colonial domination and colonial anthropocentric thinking. Living in this continuum, which traverses centuries and decades, ruling governments and states, how do people process the violence of the past while having to resist it in the present?

Latvians, with continuous protests and collective letters, managed to protect what was left of the Daugava. The now-historic essay “Thinking about the fate of the Daugava” by Dainis Īvāns and Artūrs Snips steered the public and managed to stop the megaproject expansion. However, this only happened in the late 1980s.1011 In the 1950s, any attempts to protest were impossible: the journalist Vera Kacena, who tried to resist the Pļaviņas HPP, was banned from publishing for the rest of her life.

Ukraine is trying to acknowledge the weight of repressed decades of grief for the scarred land while resisting the perpetrator who has been taking it away for decades.

The River Wailed Like a Wounded Beast, an exhibition at the Dovzhenko Centre as part of the 5th Kyiv Biennale (2023), tackles these issues. Curated by Stanislav Bytyutskyi, Aliona Penzii, and Oleksandr Teliuk, it delves into the cinematographic history of Dnipro’s transformation and the history of destinies in the catastrophes of past and present: from the erection of the first HES (in 1932) to the explosion of the Kahovka Dam in 2023.

It took me three attempts to visit. Like in an old fairy tale, I had to conquer three obstacles before getting inside the Dovzhenko Centre: three air raids. Despite the ongoing war, the exhibition opened in the historical building of Dovzhenko Centre—the largest film archive in Ukraine. So, every time there was an air raid—in Kyiv, they were happening a few times a day in the dawn of 2023—the exhibition had to close until it was “safe” again.

The Russian МіГ-31К death-carrying plane finally calms down and allows me to enter the exhibition. I find myself in a series of connected rooms, closely adjacent to the spacious, high-ceilinged hall of the Dovzhenko Centre. The exhibition poetically combines Soviet-era visual documentation and artistic propaganda films about the erection of the Dnipro cascade with live footage of the new catastrophe—the explosion at the Kahovka Dam.

In the first room, a documentary photography collection depicts Dnipro’s long-gone, majestic rocky rapids. I look at these pictures with fascination, as they offer a glimpse of how the legendary river my ancestors lived together with looked like. This is a mighty beast that the poet Taras Shevchenko asked to be buried next to, so that he could eternally listen to

“… the Dnipro and the cliffs

[…] The roaring of the river”.

Next to it, the visitor sees the cinematic collages created by Stanislav Bytiutskyi, projected on the eggshell walls, inviting one to experience representations of the Dnipro transformations in Soviet cinema by Mikhail Kaufman, Dzyga Vertov, and Oleksandr Dovzhenko. Some of the films in the montages have been censored and butchered in Soviet times. Some, like Arnold Kordum’s Wind Across the Rapids, were considered lost for a long time.

In a tragic irony, a montage of people swimming amidst their flooded homes from the film In Spring (1929) by Mikhail Kaufman mirrors the moving images in the next room. There, contemporary scenes depict victims of the Kahovka Dam explosion—at first glance similar but set in a drastically different context. The dam, originally built to “prevent flooding”, was destroyed a few generations later by the same colonial hegemony that erected it.

The last rooms feature infographics developed in collaboration with the media outlet Texty and designer Nadiya Kelm, depicting the “before” and “after” transformations that Dnipro underwent following its “Sovietisation”. Curatorial descriptions poetically situate the artworks within their historical and social contexts. The exhibition functions as a multimedia essay, where the curatorial framing tells a story. My soul breaks into a sad smile—I so rarely encounter such sincere and candid communication with the audience in modern art spaces in Amsterdam or Berlin.

The intensity of the exhibition’s multidisciplinarity does not overwhelm the audience. The space carefully weaves together art, film, representation, history, and sentiment into an intricate tapestry. This curatorial and cinematic craftsmanship achieves what art is meant to do: it makes one think and compels one to discover more.

For the curators, as for many of the visitors, the wounds are still raw—yawning, bleeding, and continually being poked. Perhaps this is why the exhibition is so powerful—there was simply no need to dramatise, exaggerate, or augment the open wound.

On not being allowed to speak

Journalists Zakhar Kolisnichenko and Andriy Chernega shared my enthralment with the Cherkasy Sea, lifeworlds of the long-gone landscapes and people who had once rooted there.

“And that time, no one explained anything . . . the way the Party says, and this is how it will be, the Party is our ruler . . . . But the Party is gone, and we are here” is a quote from their documentary Perestroika, stated by one of the villagers who were forcefully relocated from their homes in the 1950s due to the construction of the Kremenchuk HES.12

The documentary, created by Cherkasy natives Zakhar and Andriy, does not have a narrator’s voice. Consisting of oral histories and archive footage, it provides a timeless and poignant account of how Soviet industrialisation took over the human destinies of Ukrainians while flooding 200 villages in the Dnipro Valley where these people had lived for centuries:

“And who asked us? No one asked anyone . . . . Evicted . . . .”

“No protest . . . . Like cattle . . . . Kicked out of the pen and driven to slaughter”.

The journalists managed to capture stories and traumas that these people carried through their long, hard lives. Their stories often remained unspoken, left untold to children, grandchildren, and even great-grandchildren, long after Ukraine gained its independence. Perhaps, if it weren’t for Zakhar and Andriy collecting these stories of a generation that is fading away into eternity, we would never have known about their personal and collective wounds.

“Could we say that we are against, ha? Aha . . . . Who could even say that . . . .”

This need for people to share and keep their erased history alive is vividly portrayed in the comments sections on platforms where the documentary is shared. In YouTube comments, random people express sorrows for the destroyed lands and waters and attempt to restore their lost history, leaving a digital mark:

“Thank you for your good work. My grandparents were resettled from the village of Shabelnyky to the village of Tinki. They told very little about the resettlement, they just cried sometimes . . . .”

“My grandparents were from the villages of Mytky and Demky. They said they were large and rich villages founded by the Cossacks. It’s a pity that our history was destroyed like that.”

“Thank you for making the film, thank you very much! In my parents’ village, Pavlyshi, there were many immigrants from those places. And many years later, they remembered their homeland with great pain . . . . Houses, gardens, flooded cemeteries . . . . Damned empires that spit on people!”

In Soviet times, those who were othered and oppressed had no right to be angry. Expressing frustration about your rights was considered an attack on the party and the revolution. What happens when an individual has no right to express grief, anger, or loss; deprived of any instrument to address their frustration? What does this great gaslighting, on a political and intimate level, do to one’s life?

The problem lies in the fact that many post-Soviet colonised bodies are only now entering the conversation about how to process the harm whilst still, for decades, trying to claim that they, in fact, have been harmed. Colonial Soviet systems created complex ornaments of oppression with blurry hierarchies. Without the ability to name violent injustice as such, you cannot fight against it: something you want to confront just does not exist. Therefore, while the Soviet Union vanished, the traumas from its terrors remained unprocessed until today. Without a proper understanding of your past, it is impossible to build your present.

Ecocides, mass uprooting, genocides and reverberations of the desire to tame the land and its people—these are dimensions of colonial impacts that one cannot resist and “decolonize” just by thinking, talking, processing. But just like in the therapeutic journey, acknowledging the damage, acknowledging the trauma and how it affects you, finding the language and tools to process it, is a first, gigantic step towards healing.

This is what the exhibition The River Wailed Like a Wounded Beast does for me. The curators developed a moving vocabulary for telling the story of the ongoing trauma. You feel the river’s tears, you feel pain for it, you feel the longing. The curators and artists created a brilliant, situated, grounded, and accessible decolonial critique of Anthropocentrism without explicitly using this jargon. Nevertheless, the exhibition, in its poetry, artful sentimentality for the taken away, and confidence to work despite the mortal threats of the war, embodies the ongoing decolonial resistance.

The raging, long-suffering river is witnessing the landscape of Ukraine being radically changed. This time, battles between those who try to actively colonise and decolonise are happening simultaneously. The curators’ sincere and truthful language resonates deeply with visitors, reflecting the complexities of discussing the nuances of imperial dominations amidst the ongoing war.

Both the exhibition and the documentary make the observer cry for the battered river. By doing so, they are questioning Soviet colonial legacies and their enduring impact on both human and non-human entities.

These are examples of healing journeys, where making art, in its manifold forms, is an attempt to process the unspoken. Both examples show that the Soviet colonial violence and its aftermath is not a matter of perspective. It is a lived reality that has silently stamped the fate of humans and non-humans (and, predominantly, non-Russians).

How to decolonise without the coloniser?

As an anthropologist, I am deeply committed to feminist ecocritical and decolonial thinking. But in my work, I focus on people, their activism and resistance, and local discourse, not on dissecting theories. In this light I cannot help but think about how these critical discussions, especially those that are developing in Western(ised) platforms, often fail the people I work with.

While many intellectuals who were actually touched by the reverberations of the Soviet Regime have been trying to question Russian “imperial innocence” for decades, this job has not been easy, even after the Empire “struck again” in 2022. I often saw how experiences with Russian imperialism resembled a childhood trauma: subconscious and hard to put into words. Nevertheless, it always has the inexhaustible power to pull down those it encroaches upon.

For a long time, attempts to analyze the oppressive dynamics of Russia’s global influence and to describe it as “colonial” were dismissed as “melodramatic” or “overstated.” The discussion was mainly confined to the narrow circles of “Slavic Studies”. Now, it is often labelled (at least in personal conversations) as ‘reactionary’. Presenting my research before the war, I heard questions formulated as bluntly as “don’t you just use trendy concepts to justify your research?”. Often, these rhetorical questions were predicated upon an assumed lack of hierarchies of domination between Russian and “non-Russian” subjects of the Soviet Union.13

The Soviet regime diligently followed the colonial textbook of domination: culture over nature, the civilisation of the uncivilised, “educating” and “socialising” of the peasant, “normalising” all the othered: non-male, non-white, non-Russian.14 However, the USSR, which identified as socialist and anti-capitalist, claimed to be anti-imperialist and anti-colonial. This branding successfully masked the colonial practices within its own borders. Consequently, in contemporary Russia (which, as coloniser-successor of the USSR, has dominant knowledge-producing resources) postcolonial and decolonial approaches could not be on the table in mainstream public debates, art, policymaking and academia.15 Russia has yet to acknowledge its colonial impact on Ukraine, post-Soviet states, Indigenous people, Central Asian and Finno-Ugric Republics in Russia. And it likely never will. Instead, it continues to occupy and repeat Soviet-era rhetoric of being a “liberator”.

I was invited to contribute to this issue* as one of the curators of the Ukrainian Decolonial Glossary.16 UDG is an online platform that is a compilation of concepts from de- and postcolonial theories, featuring examples specific to the Ukrainian context. The first edition of this glossary showcases 20 terms, each contributed by diverse Ukrainian researchers, thinkers and artists. We had a goal to create a toolkit for dialogues about our convoluted past within and outside Ukraine.

I undertook this project because I believe that developing language to name our traumas is absolutely necessary for making sense of the past, for healing, and for building a future. However, the language of decolonisation is being erupted, misused where it is not appropriate, and denied to those who need it to claim their suffering. The healing process (and resistance that it carries) gets so much more complicated under the constant gaslighting of the perpetrator.

Not to commend Western imperialisms, but the relentless struggles and sacrifices of those who suffer under the ongoing effects of Western imperial modernities are starting to yield results. Recently, after long suffering and resistance, the Amazon River and the Whanganui River were granted personhood. Who will apologise to the Dnipro, the Aral Sea, or the River Daugava?

Tracing the metempsychosis of Soviet manipulations in its peripheries, I suggest focusing on what colonialism is in its essence: domination and subjugation in all spectrums of human relations (with humans and non-humans). Armed by the extensive multidisciplinary, plural, and multicultural bodies of work, I believe we are capable of reflecting on the multiplicity of modernities and their relation to each other. Recognising the power hierarchies that Western hegemonies dictate, we absolutely must recognise how the peculiarities of alternative modernities and colonialities, including the Soviet one, shape histories.

Decolonial, anti-colonial and postcolonial thinkings make sense when they are accessible to those whose rights and freedoms these theories are fighting for. These anti-colonial rhetorics can be tools for understanding the history and position of Ukraine (and other post-Soviet people) in the world, for dialogue (internal and external) and finding a common working language to deal with our past and present.

Whether they employ a decolonial vocabulary or not, people must have space to remember that decolonisation is a process, not an end result.17 The damage from centuries of oppression is irreversible. The Aral Sea’s breeze is forever gone, but the recent project of reforesting the lakebed is already yielding positive results for the community. When Ukraine liberates the land from the Russian occupation, a complete “cleansing” from the coloniser and return to some “untouched” state is unfortunately impossible.

Decolonisation is a movement forward—a complex, dialogic, and communal, long process of rethinking and critiquing the past and constructing new meanings. The artistic projects I discussed here poetically examine both the historical and contemporary traumas of the river and its people. This therapeutic, healing-through-art process is crucial. It is crucial for today’s resistance and the battles against empires that are yet to come.

 

This essay and the accompanying artwork originally appeared in WunderKombināts III, Latvian Art Yearbook, December 2024.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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