Uncovering War: Photography, Cartography and Truth in Ukraine

Dates: January 24-26, 2024 @ 5pm

Location: University of Oregon, 115 Lawrence Hall

Sponsors: Global Justice Program

Event Organizer: Howard Davis, Erik Steiner

Event Summary: This grant will support a visit, by Maksym Rokhmaniiko, director of the Center for Spatial Technologies (CST), an innovative office based in Kyiv, Ukraine. CST has been carrying out detailed work on the historical geography of two overlapping and convergent atrocities in Ukraine separated by 80 years: the murder and mass burial of about a hundred thousand people at the site of Babyn Yar by the Nazis and USSR, and recently the Russian invasion of Ukraine and bombing of a TV tower at the same Babyn Yar site. The work, some of it done in collaboration with Forensic Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London, involves detailed documentary research, cartography and visual representation, intended to counteract propaganda and reveal, as much as possible, the facts about the atrocities carried out first by the Nazis and later in the Russian quest to re-absorb Ukraine under Russian rule. The visit will include an illustrated public lecture about the documentation work and its meaning relative to the war in Ukraine and the disinformation that accompanies war, a workshop open to all students at UO, and a series of meetings and informal gatherings with interested faculty and students. Mr Rokhmaniiko, a Ukrainian national, has a professional architecture degree from the Kyiv National University of Engineering and Architecture and a research master’s degree in architecture, supported by a Fulbright grant, from the University of Oregon.