On 24 February 2022, academic, cultural, and activist communities began documenting new experiences of the Russian-Ukrainian war. Today, over a hundred initiatives across the country collect eyewitness accounts, take photographs, or keep diaries; document wartime dreams; archive social media, or record the destroyed heritage. The first symposium, “The Most Documented War” in 2023, was dedicated to bridging these communities and introducing them to each other. Institutions in Ukraine and abroad responded by creating support programs for documentation and archival initiatives. Therefore, the ethics and practice of international cooperation were the focus of the second symposium last year.

Documentarians choose various trajectories for the collected materials: they incorporate them into state, community, or personal archives, integrate them into educational modules and artistic works, use them as evidence in court, and ultimately transform them into fragments of memory about those killed and injured in the war. Some of these materials have already been described and cataloged in institutional collections, while others are stored in the cloud or on private computers.

This year, we want to focus on the following issues:

• Multiple Practices of Describing, Preserving, and Actualizing Materials: How do collected materials become archives? How do we take into account the durability and fragility of physical and digital documents?
• State, Institution, Community, and Individuals: Who is responsible for the creation and further existence of an archive? How does this responsibility unfold temporally and geographically?
• From Document to Argument: How can we achieve legal, epistemic, and social justice by using community materials that document war experiences?
• Practices of Access and Engagement: What goals do institutions and initiatives pursue when providing access to materials? What are the risks? How can we navigate between short-term and long-term objectives?
• The Vulnerability of Archives: How can we document lost archives, particularly in occupied and destroyed territories? How can we ensure the viability of archives in the face of various threats such as physical destruction, cyberattacks, unauthorized access, and outdated software?
• The Frustrations of Documenting and Archiving: How do documentarians deal with the expectations of the immediate results of their work and the absence of such results?

This year’s Symposium program will include a variety of formats: panel discussions, Q&A sessions, networking, walks, films, trainings, and informal exchange of experiences.

Working languages: Ukrainian and English.

Source: Center for Urban History

Organised by

Center for Urban History, Lviv; Documenting Ukraine / IWM, Vienna; INDEX: Institute for Documentation and Exchange, Lviv; Research Centre Ukraine / Max Weber Foundation, Lviv / Bonn.