FOSSILS OF SLOW VIOLENCE
collaborative project by Marika Semenenko
A fossil is any preserved remains, impression, or trace of any once-living thing from a past geological age. Fossil also refers to fuels and minerals that are non-renewable.
I conceptualise this notion to frame the process of preserving remains left by the exhaustive industrialization and devastating war — plants, animals, humans. Their remains may be found in hundred centuries as memory of the devastations imprinted on the body of the earth.
In hundred centuries the earth will recycle these remains into fossil minerals, which the US is trading for now. The land is under ruins, the soil is deadly toxic, but future
of minerals are already resolved. It seems that US-Russian “superpowers” are dividing “the skin of the unkilled bear”.
“Ukraine’s land, its geological composition, its agrarian capacities, and its population [have] become commodities”
/Asya Bazdyrieva
I conceptualise this notion to frame the process of preserving remains left by the exhaustive industrialization and devastating war — plants, animals, humans. Their remains may be found in hundred centuries as memory of the devastations imprinted on the body of the earth.
In hundred centuries the earth will recycle these remains into fossil minerals, which the US is trading for now. The land is under ruins, the soil is deadly toxic, but future
of minerals are already resolved. It seems that US-Russian “superpowers” are dividing “the skin of the unkilled bear”.
“Ukraine’s land, its geological composition, its agrarian capacities, and its population [have] become commodities”
/Asya Bazdyrieva
Ukraine as a battlefield
Ukraine as a territory of dual colonization by Western Europe and Russian Empire (reinforced by the Soviet Union)
Ukraine as a transit country, buffer zone between Russian gas and European countries
Ukraine as a Breadbasket
Ukraine as a fertile land
Ukraine as a periphery (in European cartography and Imperial Russia)
Ukrainians as a resource
Ukraine’s territory and its people as a component of material exchange
Ukraine as “Europe’s granary”
Ukraine as ideal territory for the outsourcing of European industry
Ukraine as place of misery
Since February 2022, the images from Ukraine have been of injuries, broken bodies, people in despair, distressed animals, bombed houses, missile funnels, and blood.
“Russia’s war on Ukraine is a form of military-geologic extractivism, where global petrocapitalism sponsors the war machine, and where the longer history of the region reflects the temporal depth of this violence”. Donbass is a space of endless grief, mourning and intense longing.
How to disother a land violated by war and colonial exploitation?
Artists construct Donbass not as a resource or battlefield, but as “a home of diverse more-than-human communities, which re-exist on these lands pulsing.
/ Darya Tsymbalyuk
Ukraine as a territory of dual colonization by Western Europe and Russian Empire (reinforced by the Soviet Union)
Ukraine as a transit country, buffer zone between Russian gas and European countries
Ukraine as a Breadbasket
Ukraine as a fertile land
Ukraine as a periphery (in European cartography and Imperial Russia)
Ukrainians as a resource
Ukraine’s territory and its people as a component of material exchange
Ukraine as “Europe’s granary”
Ukraine as ideal territory for the outsourcing of European industry
Ukraine as place of misery
Since February 2022, the images from Ukraine have been of injuries, broken bodies, people in despair, distressed animals, bombed houses, missile funnels, and blood.
“Russia’s war on Ukraine is a form of military-geologic extractivism, where global petrocapitalism sponsors the war machine, and where the longer history of the region reflects the temporal depth of this violence”. Donbass is a space of endless grief, mourning and intense longing.
How to disother a land violated by war and colonial exploitation?
Artists construct Donbass not as a resource or battlefield, but as “a home of diverse more-than-human communities, which re-exist on these lands pulsing.
/ Darya Tsymbalyuk
To narrate the war through stories about/with plants also means questioning our understanding of justice after the war, its temporalities, and its potential to include nonhuman beings.
Justice cannot be done by reparations alone: no reparation can soothe human grief and heart-breaking memories, and no reparation can mitigate violence that cuts across ecosystems.
We will never be able to bring about full justice.
/ Darya Tsymbalyuk
Justice cannot be done by reparations alone: no reparation can soothe human grief and heart-breaking memories, and no reparation can mitigate violence that cuts across ecosystems.
We will never be able to bring about full justice.
/ Darya Tsymbalyuk
/ soundtrack by NOGR collective