Although the museum was damaged by the lamp, most of the exhibits survived. Today, there are also items recovered from destroyed cultural objects, such as a wooden icon from a church that burned years ago and is still in pieces. Antony pointed out the carved facade of the library as he passed through the square in the middle of the Irpin. "We changed the window, but we can't get it back. "It is difficult and expensive. There are 10,000 homeless people here, it's not the right time to do something like that."
The cultural organization of Irpin not only saved and restored the works from the first years of the city, but also tries to remember the past year and a half. Managing history in real time is difficult. War has many physical scars. But they have a lot of digital stuff. They wanted to create a VR experience based on images taken while leaving Irpin, Russia, to capture the moment after the city was fully restored. It will be one of many efforts to digitize Ukraine's heritage and culture, with volunteers 3D-scanning key buildings, creating high-quality replicas of artworks and even cataloging war memorabilia for posterity. This is necessary because cultural heritage is not collateral damage in war. The invasion was motivated by the idea that Russia does not have Ukraine.
"This war is not only about territory, but also about culture," Antoniou said. "The first thing the Russians did when they occupied the territory was to destroy the cultural institutions, they destroyed all the Ukrainians and everything that identifies us as Ukrainians." Stronger reconstruction is an act of defiance and an opportunity to restore Ukrainian identity. "Cultural institutions exist to define who we are."
It is important to remember and celebrate the present. The war in Ukraine is the first conflict of this scale and scope to occur in an era of mass digitization with almost unlimited possibilities for data storage and recording.
I met cafe owner Yefimenko and board member Antonyuk through the Citizen Voice Museum, a charity project of the Rinat Akhmetov Foundation, created in 2014 to collect video testimonies of people living on the front lines of the proxy war among Ukrainians. Russian-backed military and militias in Eastern Donbass region. In the first four years, they collected thousands of hours of video footage of how ordinary people experienced the conflict. As the larger invasion began, the project expanded across the country. It is an attempt to ensure that the stories of individual civilians - small business owners, housewives, school teachers - are visible in the larger meta-narrative of the conflict, a tale of war told in 75,000 individual accounts. The idea is to "preserve as much history as possible to create a 360-degree understanding of what happened and the scale of the tragedy," foundation board member Natalya Yemchenko said. project from scratch. And it has a healing side. Jemenko said that the state should learn to remember. Otherwise, we will carry this trauma into our future and it will hurt us again and again."
Yefimenko said a year ago outside his cafe in the town of Irpin, in a garden littered with craters and corpses — where children now play in a lush castle — that reconstruction gave him a sense of mission and became an act in itself. solidarity and resistance. In Ukraine, I hear again and again that reconstruction and reform, even the smallest actions, are a way of honoring the sacrifices made, and that reconstruction is not the result of victory, but the means to achieve it.
"The only reason I'm sitting here with my coffee is because other people are dying on the front lines," he said. "I think everyone should do it in their own country. Some make coffee, some argue, some bake bread, and that's what Ukraine's economy is all about. We are fighting for our independence. Our financial independence is also important."
This article will appear in the September/October 2023 issue of WIRED UK
