Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Nataliya Bezborodova
(University of Alberta)
Daria Antsybor (State Scientific Center for Cultural Heritage Protection from Man-made Disasters)
Iryna Koval-Fuchylo (Rylsky Institute of Art Studies, Folklore and Etnology National Academy of Sciences Ukraine)
Send message to Convenors
Short Abstract
Ukraine's sacred geography has been reactivated since the full-scale Russian invasion against Ukraine. We invite reflections on the continuity and changes in Ukrainian nature narratives as the re-conception of self in the circumstances of turmoil
Long Abstract
In times of war, sacred landscape narratives frequently re-emerge as powerful tools for navigating collective trauma and rearticulating identity. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, multiple layers of myth, memory, and history have resurfaced and become associated with specific geographic sites, forming dynamic loci of cultural meaning. The Snake Mounds, ancient Scythian earthworks, have been symbolically portrayed as protectors of Kyiv after the failed Russian advance beyond this area in March 2022. Following the destruction of the Kakhovka Hydroelectric Station in July 2023, the Great Meadow, linked to Cossack-era history, was reimagined as the “Cossack navel,” functioning both as a site of cultural mourning and as a symbol of resilience. The Ukrainian Shield, a three-billion-year Precambrian geological formation, likewise acquired renewed metaphorical significance as an energetic substratum sustaining national perseverance amid an existential crisis.
This panel examines how, in the context of war, geography becomes a dynamic medium for memory, healing, and symbolic regeneration. Drawing on Tim Ingold’s dwelling perspective (2000), we consider place as inherently relational and processual, where landscapes participate in the interplay of movement, memory, and material engagement. In Ukraine, this dynamic intensifies as physical geography, embodied suffering, and cultural remembrance recursively shape one another. Building on Bernhard Waldenfels’ phenomenology of injury and healing, the panel seeks to foster interdisciplinary dialogue on the entanglement of conflict, place-making, and the transformation of cultural geographies. It also examines how war reshapes sacred and symbolic landscapes and how it intersects with broader experiences of wounding, resilience, and cultural reconfiguration.
Accepted papers
Session 1 Sunday 14 June, 2026, -Paper long abstract
The Crimean Tatars are Indigenous people of Ukraine whose origins and historical trajectory are inextricably tied to Crimea and the Northern Black Sea region. The perception of Crimea as the “motherland” and the sole historical homeland of the Crimean Tatars constitutes a central element of this community’s self-identity.
This presentation, prepared by the curators of the Miras museum exhibition on Crimean Tatar culture, examines how traditional cultural practices and heritage are deeply connected to the community’s understanding of nature and the surrounding environment. This relationship is expressed not only in worldviews but also in material culture, including decorative and applied arts, Ornek ornamentation (recognized by UNESCO as an element of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity), traditions of respect for water and fountains, and localized agricultural practices-particularly irrigation and horticultural systems-which reflect an ethos of coexistence with, rather than domination over, the natural environment.
At the same time, the cultural image of Crimean nature and landscapes has been shaped by processes of colonization and the orientalist framing of the Crimean Tatars. A recurring feature of Russian colonial practices in Crimea, historically and in the present, is the perception of the peninsula’s environment as a “rich but empty land,” suitable primarily as a site for social and economic experimentation. This perspective has repeatedly resulted in shifts in the economic specialization of the territory, the dispossession of Indigenous landholders, the imposition of monocultural farming, and other practices that disrupt the ecological and cultural balance historically sustained by the Crimean Tatars.
Paper short abstract
Donbas as a Site of Memory: The steppe and spoil tips (terykony) form an imagined geography where folklore, industrial past, and war intertwine. Once symbols of labor heroism, today they mark trauma and loss, reshaping collective identity and memory in Ukraine and beyond.
Paper long abstract
Donbas represents one of the most complex and symbolically saturated regions of contemporary Ukraine. It embodies a distinctive imagined geography, where the natural steppe and the industrial landscape intertwine in cultural narratives, oral traditions, and collective memory. At the center of this space stand two key topographical dominants: the steppe, as an archetype of boundlessness, freedom, and borderland, and the spoil tips (terykony), artificial “mountains” of the industrial age that have become new symbols of identity.
In folk songs and legends, the Donbas steppe often appears as a “foreign” and dangerous space, embodying challenges of survival and settlement. In Soviet and post-Soviet discourse, however, it was reimagined as a space of labor heroism and collective achievement. Spoil tips entered folklore and urban culture as signs of toil and suffering, “black pyramids” of memory that were at once romanticized and normalized in everyday life.
Today, under conditions of war, this landscape undergoes resemantization: the steppe once again becomes a frontier and battlefield, while spoil tips mark sites of loss, destruction, and an unresolved dialogue with the industrial past. Donbas emerges as a lieu de mémoire, where local folklore, traumatic experience, and cultural imagery intertwine into a multilayered text.
Studying Donbas as a site of memory allows us to see how landscape shapes collective identity, and how war transforms the semantics of space—from the glorification of labor to the trauma of loss. This opens pathways for reinterpreting folk perceptions of the region within a broader European framework of memory studies.
Paper short abstract
On June 6 2023 Russian occupation forces blew up Kakhovka hydroelectric power station. More than 80 settlements were flooded. The exact number of victims is currently unknown. This man-made natural disaster gave rise to narratives about flooding as an opportunity to escape from occupation.
Paper long abstract
The sudden flooding of the lands due to the explosion of the Kakhovka hydroelectric power station by Russian occupation forces gave rise to new narratives, in particular stories about escaping from the occupation. People took the opportunity to leave the occupation, avoiding filtration. Ukrainians “on oars”, that is, on boats and on homemade rafts, left the occupied flooded villages at night. This became possible due to the spill of water and the withdrawal of Russian troops.
I wrote down the story of a woman who made a raft from two empty refrigerators and took herself and her paralyzed husband out of the occupation. Another young woman in a boat saved herself, her mother, her child and her pets. Narrators emphasize that escaping by water was dangerous both because of the possibility of being shot at and because of the mines that were in the water and that exploded upon contact. Implementing the decision required considerable physical effort from the woman, since she had to flee quietly, silently, that is, she could not start the boat's engine, and she had to row with oars. The narrator unfolds his narrative as a heroic, not a tragic, story. He mentions the possible victims of the flooding in passing, but he dwells on the description of people who themselves flee from the occupation and save their relatives in considerable detail, returning to these plots several times.
Paper short abstract
The transformation of the perception of Snake Island from an ancient heritage to a symbol of resistance to russian aggression.
Paper long abstract
For a considerable period, Snake Island attracted the attention of historians, biologists, and border guards, yet it exerted little influence on the everyday life of ukrainians. This situation changed in February 2022, when the bravery of the island’s garrison instilled resilience and hope in many people. Subsequently, Snake Island became the subject of intense public debate, international negotiations, and popular cultural expression. The heightened attention also prompted a renewed consideration of the ancient sacred significance that the greeks once ascribed to this island. Owing to the efforts of historians, cultural scholars, museum professionals, and journalists, Snake Island continues to occupy a prominent place in public discourse today, having become an integral element of contemporary mass culture. The objectives of future research will involve examining the forms and trajectories of transformation, as well as the perspectives and interpretations associated with the island.
Special emphasis should be placed on examining the parallels between antiquity and contemporary history, as well as on analyzing the appropriation of classical receptions as as symbols in the context of the present struggle.
Paper short abstract
Drawing from research on hosting Ukrainian refugees in Poland, this paper explores how rural landscapes and nature-oriented practices such as gardening became means for continuity, autonomy, and healing. Earth and plants became symbols of resilience, gratitude, and hope in times of war.
Paper long abstract
Nature – understood both as symbolic landscapes and plant-oriented practices – is not usually the main focus of migration studies. Yet during months of fieldwork among Ukrainian refugees in Poland I observed that, while often taken for granted, nature plays a crucial role in dwelling and home-making for the displaced and their hosts.
This paper asks how Ukrainian refugees and their Polish hosts mobilize “nature” to cope with trauma, rebuild autonomy, reconnect with a sense of home, and express emotions. It also considers how such practices and associations reshape host–guest relations and the meaning of place during war, granting new significance to the ordinary.
The paper draws on findings from the project “Hosting Refugees: Private Hosting of Ukrainian Refugees in Polish Homes” (led by Natalia Bloch, AMU Poland), which investigates everyday hosting practices through multi-sited ethnography. While not designed with a focus on nature, the project reveals that hosting arrangements are also ecological encounters.
Fieldwork in both villages and cities shows a recurring motif of rural continuity: many refugees with countryside backgrounds deliberately chose to settle in Polish villages, valuing familiar environments and the chance to cultivate soil. Gardening provided occupation, restored embodied skills, and supported psychological repair. At the same time, urban contexts exposed different forms of ecological longing and adaptation. Plants also circulated as gifts, leaving enduring traces of hospitality and memory.
These practices generate new relational landscapes in which nature mediates memory, belonging, and healing, bridging migration studies with debates on healing landscapes and the posthuman.
Paper short abstract
Drawing on the idea of the right to the city, Natalia argues that by transforming of and caring for micro-scale spaces (homes, gardens, courtyards, streets, etc.) during the full-scale Russian war, Ukrainians restore connection to the threatened environments and create domains of control.
Paper long abstract
The paper examines how Ukrainians speak about their changed relations with places of everydayness (homes, gardens, courtyards, streets, etc.) during the full-scale Russian war. Drawing on the idea of the right to the city, Natalia argues that by transforming and caring for micro-scale spaces, Ukrainians restore connection to the threatened social and physical environments and create domains of control. She also explores the proximity to the frontline as a factor that impacts engagement with the space. The paper contributes to the discussion on care, but extends it beyond social relations. Thus, caring for spaces becomes an individual coping strategy and a tool of maintaining social connections with those nearby and those who were before and will come after. It shows the complexity of care as it embodies love, support, and desire to control, which acquire additional dimensions in conditions of threat. Natalia builds her research on the two waves of interviews (150 conversations recorded in 2022 and 95 follow-up interviews in 2024-25) conducted with Ukrainians who were forcefully displaced after the Russian invasion of 2022. In 2024, some returned to their former places of residence, while others remained in the host communities or migrated abroad, so the paper also has a temporal and spatial comparison.
Paper short abstract
Authors analyze the topic of Ukrainian landscapes, wounded during the Russian full-scale invasion, in Ukrainian Art. The three artistic projects (Buchatska, Zviagintseva, Kokhan) reveal the tendencies of Artistic reflections on the landscape, which in context of existential danger feels like a body.
Paper long abstract
The theme of wounded landscape has gained prominence in Ukrainian art during the Russian full-scale invasion period (since February 2022). The curators of the Past / Future / Art memory culture platform analyze three artistic projects related to their curatorial practice. Katya Buchatska’s “This World is Recording” (2022) reflects a way to heal the wounded landscape by planting a tree in every shell crater. She imagines an orchard that we plant despite being aware that we can lose it. Anna Zviagintseva’s “Ground Shadows” (2023) reflects on the history of Babyn Yar’s landscape, wounded during the World War II and the Russo-Ukrainian War. In 1941, the ravine witnessed one of the most horrendous acts of the Holocaust in Ukraine. In 2022, a Russian missile killed pedestrians in Babyn Yar and maimed the trees. The artist thus tackles the theme of the vulnerability of all living things before the aggression and creates the imagery of interflowing anthropomorphic and plant forms in a situation of mortal danger. “In memoriam of us all” (2025) is Vitaliy Kokhan’s project that deals with the urban wounded landscape. It is a reflection on the wartime life in Saltivka—Kharkiv’s major bedroom community, heavily damaged by Russian aggression. The artist proposed to document the city’s experience under Russian attacks on the walls of a damaged school. These projects represent tendencies of the themes that Ukrainian art processes in the context of experiencing existential danger, when the sense of one’s own body gets extrapolated to the country’s entire territory.
Paper short abstract
Tree planting and gardening have become key commemorative practices in wartime Ukraine, shifting memory from static monuments to living landscapes. Amid ecological devastation, planting embodies mourning, healing, and restoration—even for communities rooted in traditional memorial forms.
Paper long abstract
In the context of Russia’s full-scale invasion, tree planting and gardening have become vital commemorative gestures in Ukraine, offering alternatives to the monumental, anthropocentric memorial tradition inherited from Soviet visual culture. Despite the ongoing war, there is a strong societal need for acts of remembrance enacted now, within everyday life and shared spaces. Increasingly, commemoration takes root through living forms: trees, shrubs, gardens, and the act of planting itself.
A striking example is the “Posadka” memorial in Zaporizhzhia — a large-scale kinetic monument that reimagines the memorial landscape as a sound grove. Such gestures echo historical “posadkas” — Soviet-era shelterbelts in the steppe and, during the war, defensive positions — while imbuing them with new meanings tied to mourning, resilience, and local agency. On a smaller scale, villagers in Lviv region planted currant bushes in memory of fallen soldiers, merging intimate rural gestures with collective mourning.
Contemporary artists also explore arboreal and gardening imagery: Karina Synytsia and Anastasiia Pustovarova work with trees and green growth as carriers of memory; Kateryna Aliinyk turns to soil as both material and metaphor; and the collective project “Situational Flowerbeds” uses urban greenery as a site of participatory social performance of mourning.
Through gardens and trees, landscapes become active participants in memory-making, offering living, processual counterpoints to static monuments. The ecological devastation of war further reshapes commemorative impulses: even communities with traditionally conservative approaches to memorialization increasingly seek to restore damaged ecosystems and landscapes, intertwining ecological recovery with collective remembrance.
Paper short abstract
This paper analyzes the recontextualization of Ukrainian folkloric and symbolic landscapes during the Russo-Ukrainian war, focusing on their role in cultural resilience, identity reinforcement, and nation-building through the cases of Ukrainian demonology and landscape mythologies.
Paper long abstract
The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine has intensified the cultural significance of landscape-related symbols rooted in folkloric and mythological traditions.
One prominent example is the reactivation of the mavka image. In Ukrainian demonology, mavkas are liminal figures associated with water and early summer rituals, traditionally luring men to their deaths. During the first months of the invasion, this image was reframed in narratives and memes where mavkas led Russian soldiers into swamps. The motif also entered activism: a women’s initiative in the occupied territories adopted the name “Angry Mavkas” (Zli Mavky), employing folklore as symbolic registers of defiance and resistance against invasion and occupation.
A second case concerns the symbolic revival of the Great Meadow (Velykyi Luh) after the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam in July 2023. The drainage of the reservoir revealed lands submerged since the 1950s and historically linked to Cossack culture. Their resurfacing was framed as the return of the “sacred lands of the Cossacks,” activating narratives of continuity, resilience, and democratic tradition. This reinterpretation also served as a compensatory mechanism in response to ecological devastation, reaffirming national identity through landscape mythologies.
Finally, the Ukrainian Crystalline Shield, an ancient geological formation, has acquired renewed metaphorical value. Popular interpretations present it as a “charging device” sustaining the civilizational energy of the population. While scientifically ungrounded, this image provides a symbolic language of endurance and deep historical rootedness.
Reimagined through folkloric frameworks, these symbols function as mechanisms of cultural resilience, identity reinforcement, and collective meaning-making under conditions of war.
Paper short abstract
Nature(s) in Narrative is a participatory workshop by Anastazie Toros exploring memory, home, and environment through storytelling and embodied practice. Using imaginative exercises, participants connect personal stories with ecological themes of belonging, resilience, and responsibility.
Paper long abstract
Nature(s) in Narrative is a participatory workshop that explores the intersections of memory, home, and environment through storytelling and embodied practice. The workshop is designed to create a safe, accessible, and reflective space in which participants can engage at their own pace, with an emphasis on care and inclusivity.
The session begins with shared guidelines and an opening reflection on personal stories and early memories of home. Through short introductions, participants locate themselves in relation to home and place, before being guided through an imaginative meditation inspired by Michael Chekhov’s method. This exercise invites participants to recall sensory details of childhood homes, neighbourhood landscapes, and early encounters with nature, situating memory as a bridge between personal identity and ecological awareness.
Building on these reflections, participants work in pairs and small groups to exchange stories of their first experiences with nature, favourite places, and objects tied to belonging. Through storytelling, drawing, and embodied exploration, individual memories are reimagined as shared narratives, highlighting recurring themes such as wonder, freedom, fragility, and resilience. Participants are then invited to connect these themes to broader ecological concerns, including sustainability, biodiversity, and responsibility toward future generations.
The workshop concludes with collective reflection, as participants articulate insights gained and identify one action they might carry forward. By linking intimate memories to environmental awareness, Nature(s) in Narrative demonstrates how personal storytelling can nurture belonging, strengthen ecological consciousness, and inspire meaningful action in the face of environmental challenges.