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by Natalia Volvach
In this photographic essay, I present instances of vibrant voids – the material vestiges of violent erasure resulting in holes, cracks, shades, and shadows in the semiotic landscapes of Ukraine, as caused by the Russian annexation of Crimea and the ongoing war all over the country. Rather than simply viewing them as dead semiotic landscapes, I treat them as vibrant. Building on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Crimea and Southern Ukraine between 2017 and 2019, affectively charged voids of varying forms, shapes, and sizes, reify acts of committed violence, and illuminate the social afterlives of devastated and destroyed landscapes.
Vibrant voids of war are intertwined with human and nonhuman others and thus require a situated reading or, even, sensing on behalf of the researcher. Voids attest to various intensities and modalities of violence, ranging from the seemingly harmless holes left from erased sign plates on walls of residential buildings to meter-long craters made by artillery sowing the fertile Ukrainian soil. What these ruins share is the hand of the Russian occupier. The Russian colonial project attempts to force the Ukrainian statehood into non-existence, confronting us with nothing but wounded places and people.
Simferopol, 2019.
Emptified premises of hotels now abandoned in Evpatorya, 2019.
Until 2015, the sign of the Crimean Dental Polyclinic was visible here on the left. The sign has been erased since the official registration and ownership of the Polyclinic has been changed. Furthermore, by erasing the sign, the visibility of the Ukrainian flag and the coat of arms on the previously installed sign-plate could be omitted. Pushkin Street, Simferopol, 2019.
Antiquated graffiti gradually turning into a shadow, Simferopol, 2019.
Assets forfeiture in the Ukrainian Crimea. The Ukrainian bank PrivatBank no longer operates in Crimea, its premises nationalized by Russia. The only thing that remains from the bygone past are the holes from previously indicated currency exchange, Evpatorya, 2019.
Cape Fiolent in Yalta, the Ukrainian coat of arms seeps through the whitewashed shield, Yalta, 2019.
Only shades remain from the previously visible letters making up “The Autonomous Republic of Crimea”, Simferopol, 2019.
In response to the Russian aggression, the visual composition of public space across Ukraine – especially the appearance of the monuments, street names and memory plaques indexing the Soviet past – underwent massive redesign. The Ukrainian parliament passed a package of laws on decommunization, regulating toponymy and the use of public monuments across Ukraine. As a result of such policies, statues, monuments, or commemorative plaques containing Soviet symbolism were dismantled, and old Soviet names were erased. A monument to the “Youth of Komsomol” in Kherson, too, has lost some of its compromising inscriptions, 2017.
“Ukrainian fields are suffering from air strikes by the Russian military. This is what every crossroads on the way to Izium in the Kharkiv region looks like. May 2022. Photo from Roman Ratushnyi page”.
Vibrant voids are material-discursive effects of political forms of domination, violence, and dispossession. An exploration of vibrant voids through attention to any form of rupture, contestation, roughness, or ‘non-smoothness’ in a semiotic landscape may (re)animate other voices previously forced into silence. Beyond the context of the ongoing Russian war against Ukraine, voids can be interrogated in other social and political settings. By posing questions such as: why this void, what does it mean here, what conditions led to the creation of this void, what has been erased, by whom, and why, an exploration of semiotic landscapes as complex, historically layered, and ideological phenomena becomes possible. Further, going beyond the immediately visible semiotic landscapes to those that no longer exist, in search of encounters, in which complex historicities are co-present, is another way of attending to absencing in semiotic landscapes of turbulent places.
About the author
About the author
Dr. Natalia Volvach works at the intersection of semiotic landscapes, critical sociolinguistics and linguistic ethnography. In her research, she explores the ramifications of the Crimean annexation on language and space. Specifically, she illuminates the ways in which the complex histories of conflict over the Crimean Peninsula are materialized in ‘absenced’ semiotic landscapes, both in the form of material effects in landscapes and as discursively realized in the narrated memories of individual participants. She has recently defended her Ph.D. thesis entitled "From Words to Voids: Absencing and Haunting in Crimean Semiotic Landscapes". In her latest paper "Shouting absences: Disentangling the ghosts of Ukraine in occupied Crimea", she further disentangles the absences and spectres of Ukraine in the Russian-occupied Crimea.
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