When the war hit Kharkiv in 2022, the urban space transformed at a scale impossible for its inhabitants and artistic community to process. As it turns out, the urban space of Kharkiv was difficult to process long before the impact of drones and missiles. Kharkiv has been transforming for centuries, collecting monuments and memories from the ebbs and flows of history. The authors zoom in on three events over the past decade that reflect how different actors used the cityscape of Kharkiv to make sense of and shape their context: Architect and visual artist Vasylysa Shchogoleva explores the urban space of Kharkiv in 2023 as a place of healing and compassion. Cultural anthropologist Viktoriia Grivina takes us back to 2018 when a piece of street art on a wall became the epicenter of a community conflict. Anthropologist Hjørdis Clemmensen opens a window to the workshop of a group of architecture students in 2013 who wished to not only influence the space around them but also time itself.
"Kharkiv, as a city, has both a very long and a very short memory. There is no nativity in Kharkiv's remembrance-it's an active skill that this city practices all the time or, depending on circumstances, doesn't practice at all. A city of students, a city of fast business and slow change, a city that thousands of young professionals leave every year, only some of whom return. For me, as a lecturer at the Kharkiv School of Architecture, my personal goal and mission has always been to build such connections between future architects and the city that would form a community of young proactive professionals devoted to Kharkiv, agents of change who will be captivated by its colossal opportunities and contribute to the formation of new powerful institutions that Kharkiv so desperately needs. A year before the start of the full-scale invasion, the Kharkiv School of Architecture celebrated its first anniversary. The second anniversary took place in Lviv, where the school, along with students and teachers, was forced to evacuate after February 24th. We all faced the challenge of finding and building a new type of connection with our city, Kharkiv, while being outside of Kharkiv. For all three authors, this is a personal practice that they have already undertaken and are ready to present its results. After all, each of them has this special experience of leaving the city and returning to it. In my opinion, the diversity of perspectives through which the context of Kharkiv is presented in this book can become a kind of tutorial or set of tools that illustrates ways of organizing memory and living testimonies of the turbulent life of a city that always happens outside of rules and systems."
-Mariia Tselik, Studio Lecturer and architect, Kharkiv School of Architecture
