nature, memory, humans, responsibility
Memory Landscapes
"When thinking about what those forests were exposed to and what then remained in the “memory” of their thick bark, mighty branches, and the dense network of roots invisible from the ground, I cannot but get back to the endless debate on the definition of memory. In which way does it work? Who (or what) possesses the ability of forming and storing recollections? If nature can remember, what is it that we, humans, can learn from and about it?"
Memory Landscapes is my multidisciplinary project that combines archival research, museology, visual art, and writing on collective memory manipulation, nostalgia, and the role of museums and memorials at the sites of Europe's traumatic past. So far I define it as ongoing, because I continue dedicating my time to reflecting on the topic of what can actually constitute a recollection, serve as a primer or memory aid, what or who is able to remember and pass a memory further on.
Following my interest in this growing set of questions, I am still adding new chapters moving on from the initial impulse to write about memory of nature towards the necessity to rethink Antropocene (human-centered memory production) and learn from the ancient preliterary, more nature-based cultures, where stones and trees could actually contain memories. Anyone who ever had a chance to walk around 3,000 standing stones of Carnac would agree that this statement is only partly a metaphor.
But back in 2022, as I came to Berlin as an ICORN Fellow, it certainly did not start with such long-lasting ambitions. The intial idea of the project was conceived in January 2023 during a rather unplanning visit to the memorial in Dachau, Germany - the place that deeply touched me in every possible sense. But what also attracted my attention there were poplar trees growing there, almost unchanged, since the Nazi times, unlike many other structures demolished after 1945 and then rebuilt - already as a part of the newly made memory site. The inner urge to reflect, contact and interact with the nature of the places of traumatic past brought me to eventually visit 19 of them (in Germany, Austria, Poland, Italy, Lithuania, the Netherlands and Montenegro), collecting information about these countries' memorial politics, sometimes contacting activists or the dwellers of the neighbouring towns.
My search was only partly intuitive - what took me to the first three camps was a rationally inexplicable wish to learn more about Antonio (Anton) Bubich, a teenage boy, former prisoner, who I shared my last name with.
Following my interest in this growing set of questions, I am still adding new chapters moving on from the initial impulse to write about memory of nature towards the necessity to rethink Antropocene (human-centered memory production) and learn from the ancient preliterary, more nature-based cultures, where stones and trees could actually contain memories. Anyone who ever had a chance to walk around 3,000 standing stones of Carnac would agree that this statement is only partly a metaphor.
But back in 2022, as I came to Berlin as an ICORN Fellow, it certainly did not start with such long-lasting ambitions. The intial idea of the project was conceived in January 2023 during a rather unplanning visit to the memorial in Dachau, Germany - the place that deeply touched me in every possible sense. But what also attracted my attention there were poplar trees growing there, almost unchanged, since the Nazi times, unlike many other structures demolished after 1945 and then rebuilt - already as a part of the newly made memory site. The inner urge to reflect, contact and interact with the nature of the places of traumatic past brought me to eventually visit 19 of them (in Germany, Austria, Poland, Italy, Lithuania, the Netherlands and Montenegro), collecting information about these countries' memorial politics, sometimes contacting activists or the dwellers of the neighbouring towns.
My search was only partly intuitive - what took me to the first three camps was a rationally inexplicable wish to learn more about Antonio (Anton) Bubich, a teenage boy, former prisoner, who I shared my last name with.
"The sites commemorating the Nazism and Bolshevism victims as well as literary and historical narratives around them reflect not only the events themselves but also national myths and ruptures, religious archetypes, and ideological paradigms that have constructed remembrance. The architecture and iconography in these memorials embody specific political and cultural knowledge, crucially shaping future generations’ understanding of those tumultuous times. However, the rise of the far-right movement across Europe, the ascendance of capitalism and war — physical and mental — accompany the spread of amnesia and misremembering, with the promise of never again largely unfulfilled.
Visiting memorial camps and recalling the sites of mass executions across Europe, I started questioning temporal and spatial representation of traumatic pasts focusing on the role of nature - as a witness, victim and hostage of violence committed in the 20th century. So far, not so much has been written about the ecology of memorial sites. Neither is nature frequently granted a memory of its own, whether symbolic or physical. But the neglect of history demands that we rethink anthropocentric memory and put nature - as an agent capable of remembering - into the centre of our reflections. My research aims to learn about and from nature to resist social acceleration, ruinous non-synchronous perception of time as well as memory commodification and instrumentalisation."
(a fragement of "Memory Landscapes" project description shown with a selection of images and extended research-based captions at the exhibitions and memory studies conferences in Munich (Germany), Södertörn (Sweden), Prague (the Czech Republic), and High Wycombe (the UK), 2024-2025)
Visiting memorial camps and recalling the sites of mass executions across Europe, I started questioning temporal and spatial representation of traumatic pasts focusing on the role of nature - as a witness, victim and hostage of violence committed in the 20th century. So far, not so much has been written about the ecology of memorial sites. Neither is nature frequently granted a memory of its own, whether symbolic or physical. But the neglect of history demands that we rethink anthropocentric memory and put nature - as an agent capable of remembering - into the centre of our reflections. My research aims to learn about and from nature to resist social acceleration, ruinous non-synchronous perception of time as well as memory commodification and instrumentalisation."
(a fragement of "Memory Landscapes" project description shown with a selection of images and extended research-based captions at the exhibitions and memory studies conferences in Munich (Germany), Södertörn (Sweden), Prague (the Czech Republic), and High Wycombe (the UK), 2024-2025)
"In our mind's eye we are accustomed to think of the Holocaust as having no landscape, writes British historian Simon Schama in Landscape and Memory. The first associations one could have in this regard are rather dark - the nature that witnesses human suffering should be emptied of features and color, shrouded in night and fog, blanketed by perpetual winter, collapsed into shades of dawn and grey. And thus it is shocking, as Schama remarks, to realize that many concentration camps actually belong to a brilliant vivid countryside with riverlands, picturesque lakes and avenues of poplar and aspen adorning their edges. [1995; P26]
In the survivors' memoirs, nature was recalled as an element of existential paradox: yes, at times it was peceived as comforting and promising hope, but most often - as indifferent. Seasons will change and flowers will bloom regardless of people's presence, or, as Belarusian scholar Inha Lindarenka argues, in woods the law of the forest operates, according to which nothing leaves, it just gets replaced. "
(a fragment of my essay "On Memory Landscapes", 2024)
In the survivors' memoirs, nature was recalled as an element of existential paradox: yes, at times it was peceived as comforting and promising hope, but most often - as indifferent. Seasons will change and flowers will bloom regardless of people's presence, or, as Belarusian scholar Inha Lindarenka argues, in woods the law of the forest operates, according to which nothing leaves, it just gets replaced. "
(a fragment of my essay "On Memory Landscapes", 2024)
As time passed, I felt the need to introduce more layers into the visual dimension of Memory Landscapes - that appeared to be no longer only about nature and my interaction with it... I realized that all the places I had visited were full of some existential energy one could hardly find the right words to describe. Those forests, stones, roots and tree bark were never silent, their life - as well as their perception of time were so far from those of our own, which I now approached as small, limited, numb... While I was reading and writing about nature of various traumatic sites, nature was reading me.
My Instaxes able to catch random fragments of those encounters managed "to document" only the tip of the memory iceberg, and this helplessness of mine, in parallel with the admiration of nature and its incomprehensibility, drove me to continue my search for the visual language. How can I try to show that is hidden, blurred, ever-changing and so... alive? I was asking myself. And I still am.
My Instaxes able to catch random fragments of those encounters managed "to document" only the tip of the memory iceberg, and this helplessness of mine, in parallel with the admiration of nature and its incomprehensibility, drove me to continue my search for the visual language. How can I try to show that is hidden, blurred, ever-changing and so... alive? I was asking myself. And I still am.
In 2022-2025 I had an honor to talk about Memory Landscapes showing my works during lectures, workshops, and exhibitions on a number of wonderful occasions, including:
- Memory Landscapes: Re-Thinking the Nature of Memorial Sites. Subtle Transitions Workshop, Prague, April 5, 2024
- Memory Landscapes: Olga Bubich's Artist Talk. Vilna Belarusian Museum, Vilnius, July 22
- Memory Landscapes: Re-Thinking the Nature of Memorial Sites. History Unit/N-ost, Berlin, October 19, 2024
- 7th Tea Oval: Vocabulary of Memory: Seven Terms for Discussing Art from Belarus with Olga Bubich (moderated by Zoncy Heavenly). The Institute for Endotic Research. Berlin, November 14, 2024
- Archived Ruptures - Ruptured Archives. Collaboration, Intervention, Resistance. Käte Hamburger Research Centre/global dis:connect (group exhibition), Munich, November 28-29, 2024
- Photography, Memory, and Opinions. Lecture-dialogue with Yauhen Attsetski. FSH1Minsk, Warsaw, December 8, 2024
- Memory Landscapes (solo exhibition), Södertörn Library, Stockholm, Sweden, May 8-13, 2025
- Voices of Memory, Prague, July 14-18, 2025, the 9th Annual Memory Studies Association Conference
The next important step of the project was the publication of the book/catalogue, supported by DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program. Marking the end of my ICORN Fellowship, the volume collected 13 essays (in English, apart from three which are in Russian) most of which were written in 2023-2024 and, at different levels, address the subject of memory.
The book also features the images from the eponymous series accompanied by the extended captions that contain the geolocations of the captured natural elements and information about the ecological (environmental) past and present of the sites, as well as the photographs from my family archive.
The book also features the images from the eponymous series accompanied by the extended captions that contain the geolocations of the captured natural elements and information about the ecological (environmental) past and present of the sites, as well as the photographs from my family archive.
If memory and nature are the topics you are also interested in, here are just a few books I highly recommend you to check out.
- Pieces of Light: The New Science of Memory, by Charles Fernyhough
- The Memory Code, by Lynne Kelly
- Why We Remember, by Charan Ranganath
- Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered, by Ruth Klüger
- Golden Harvest: Events at the Periphery of the Holocaust, by Jan Tomasz Gross, Irena Grudzińska-Gross
- The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning, by James Edward Young
- The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators, by Michael Rothberg
- How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them, by Jason F. Stanley
- Searching for Memory: The Brain, the Mind, and the Past, by Daniel L. Schacter
- How I Became a Tree, by Sumana Roy
- Landscape and Memory, by Simon Schama