ruins collective: what cannot be remembered is doomed to repeat itself

Teta Tsybulnyk (1987) is an artist, filmmaker, and psychoanalyst with academic background in sociology, social anthropology, and clinical psychology. Her research spans from the non-human gaze on nature to semiotics of the unconscious and dreams. Elias Parvulesco (1985) is an artist, curator, and film archivist. He was a film history scholar and programmer at the Oleksandr Dovzhenko National Centre in Kyiv. Together with Oleg Isakov, they founded ruїns collective, Kyiv-based film and art group that aims to reflect on the complex world of today and develop appropriate ethical paradigms.

Teta Tsybulnyk and Elias Parvulesco co-authored a number of video works with a long-standing focus on the Ukrainian national liberation struggle. Films such as dendro dreams (2018), zong (2019), and Salty Oscillations (2021) combine this focus with an interest in non-human agents and interspecies relations. In Salty Oscillations they research the collective mythology of the landscape of Soledar, a town known for its salt mines, which was controlled by Russia-backed separatists in early 2014, later liberated by Ukrainian forces and then totally destroyed by Russian agression during the full scale invasion. In films made after the full scale invasion they often deal with infrastructures that were decommissioned and destroyed by Russian aggression. Endless Sea of Sand (2023) focuses on the Enerhodar nuclear power plant which was founded in 1970 as part of a Soviet modernist project focusing on industrialization, urban growth, and new nuclear technologies. Parvulesco and Tsybulnyk juxtapose Soviet urban planning propaganda and the images of the wartime state of Enerhodar. The film Narcissus Sacro Narcissus Profano (2023), authored by Parvulesco separately, then tells the story of a museum dedicated to the Ukrainian philosopher and writer Hryhoriy Skovoroda, which was destroyed by Russian aggression on May, 6, 2022. The film depicts the loss of an institution whose mission was to preserve and protect local memory. Through 3D animation Parvulesco reconstructed the destruction of the museum and the building itself.

Their films were screened at international film festivals and art exhibitions worldwide including Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival (2014, 2018); FIDMarseille – Marseille International Film Festival (2022); International Short Film Festival Oberhausen (2022); Glasgow Short Film Festival (2022); Kyiv International Film Festival Molodist (2018); Docudays UA International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival (2020) or Documenta 15 (2022).

You often work with a short format oscillating between video art and film. What is it like to treat such complex topics as the war reality of Ukraine in a short format? Does the short experimental footage bring any advantages?

Elias Parvulesco: I would say, beyond industrial cinema the short form is more natural and widespread. Historically, it appeared earlier, before the Hollywood model of commercial features won in the 1910s. It seems to me that there is nothing anomalous about using short running time in conversations about complex or difficult topics. When we edit the films we don’t want them to be too long, as we try to be ecological with the spectators’ attention. However, when the perception of time itself is one of the topics of the work, as we had it in dendro dreams, the film could be slower and longer. The conventions of the feature forms have never dominated in our works and I’m happy that beyond commercial cinema and television, there are galleries and festivals that welcome any kind of running time format.

In your films, you usually approach the subject through a kind of micro view, a focus in which you concentrate on one particular situation. Do you consider this a radical break with the traditional “big” cinema and its ways of storytelling?

Elias Parvulesco: Our works belong to the field of documentary, experimental film or contemporary video art, which exist in opposition to the storytelling mode of feature-length psychological dramas. However, even the most abstract films (for instance, Warhol’s or Brakhage’s works) consist of a narrative structure for the human mind. Similarly, we always use some stories as a background structure for our works. Moreover, we are interested in working with language, with the syntax of messages so we usually explore and mix different types of narration. For instance, in dendro dreams we speculatively explored the phenomenology of trees, but in parallel quoted laws, science books, and poetry. In zong, besides visual immersion in different time periods, we had excerpts from texts of that respective epochs, from the 19th century ethnographic tales to the Soviet era didactic pamphlets and contemporary ecological articles. Finally, in K-Object from LL Group (2019) we emphasized the random and deceptive nature of internet narratives about real physical objects.

Teta, in your psychoanalytic work you focus on the research of dreams and semiotics of the unconscious, on recovering memories, connecting the past and the present, and understanding what meaning lies behind particular symptoms. As you said in a different interview in this kind of therapy, people slowly rediscover their personal history, reclaim their disowned, split-off parts, and figure out what they really desire. While making your films about Ukrainian national struggle were you thinking how you can apply this approach in the question of national/collective liberation?

Teta Tsybulnyk: Even though psychoanalysis works primarily with the individual subject, its method can be useful in exploring collective history. Freud argued that societies can also have their repressed memories and tensions between the conscious and the unconscious. Ukraine has a difficult history marked by centuries of oppression and systemic violence committed by Russian imperialism. The Empire operates by erasing national identity, memory, language; by destroying any possibility of difference and self-determination. Ukrainian cultural memory is shattered and full of gaps, it bears a huge weight of collective trauma that prevents us from processing our history and really knowing ourselves. Trauma makes it impossible to remember, and what cannot be remembered is doomed to repeat itself compulsively. The psychoanalytic method as such is devoted to filling in such gaps of oblivion, to scrupulous reconstruction of the past while admitting that there will always be something unknowable or unconscious about ourselves. In my opinion, this approach can lend useful insights for artists, researchers, writers, and all those who seek to understand and represent our experience as a nation.

A documentary about the town of Soledar, Salty Oscillations, focuses on the role that the town, known for its salt mines and specific landscape, has played in the collective unconscious and mythology of its inhabitants. The documentary was filmed before the Russian full-scale invasion and therefore before the destruction of the town. Now the town is uninhabited, abandoned, salt mining has been suspended, the mines destroyed. How did the role of the landscape of Soledar in Ukrainian collective consciousness change?

Elias Parvulesco: It is important to emphasize that the Russian military aggression and invasion of Ukraine started in 2014. Soledar was almost a frontline town between 2014 and 2022, but was totally destroyed during the current phase of the war. Soledar was a nice and quiet small town, little known beyond the region, however, the Ukrainian art institution Izolyatsia picked it for their relocation after they had left Donetsk in 2014. They invited us and other artists to work within the Soledar context. The steppe landscape of the Donetsk region was one of the main motifs between the industrial mining past and the uncertain post-industrial future of the town. Interestingly, the town had not coal but salt mines which were emblematic of the local identity and created a link to prehistoric times, when salt was formed at the bottom of an ancient ocean. Bringing in Teta’s background as a psychologist, we combined the narratives of landscape and mythology with the exploration of the local unconscious and identity, creating a poetic speculative documentary devoted to the Soledar inhabitants. It was a tragedy to follow the news of how the Russians in 2022-23 destroyed all the places shot in the film.

Teta, how did your psychoanalytic background influence the film about Soledar, which relates to the collective unconscious and the impact of landscapes that we cannot know sensually on the unconscious?

Teta Tsybulnyk: When we went to Soledar in 2021, I was just beginning my path as a psychoanalyst, and my primary research interest was dreams. At the same time, as artists we were always interested in landscape and the way we humans look at it and form relationships with it. So we decided to start our research of the Soledar landscape by approaching the local residents and asking them to share their dreams about their city. We presumed that the physical landscape to some degree shapes people’s mental space and the sense of identity. At the same time, by asking them about their dreams, fantasies and symbols related to the city, we discovered the psychological dimension of the landscape. The town is not just a web of buildings, natural resources and infrastructures, but a complex amalgam of memory, imagination, and mythology. Our film Salty Oscillations tried to capture Soledar as a multilayered space created in dynamic interaction of the physical and the mental, the real and the imaginary, the human and the nonhuman. Its underground salt mines became the metaphor of the city’s unconscious – a place not just of industrial value, but of buried collective memories, folklore, and deep symbolism for this community.

How is it for you to work together as a duo? What are the struggles and what are the advantages?

Elias Parvulesco: We have our own individual artistic and non-artistic practices, and we also had some wider collaborations with other artists, musicians, or scientists, as it was in zong. Additionally, I had a couple of creative projects with a group of film scholars from the Dovzhenko Center, a Ukrainian national film archive, and used to practice performance art. Within our duo, Teta usually elaborates the ideas for our films while I work on the formal side and the technical implementation.

Teta Tsybulnyk: Working as a duo feels like a stimulating conversation. When the idea is born, we talk a lot and brainstorm the possibilities of how it could proceed, exchanging our different sensibilities and backgrounds. The thinking process unfolds as a dialogue, departing from two (or more) places at the same time and then finding some meeting points. While this is always an exciting and fruitful method, recently we decided to focus more on our solo works to get a better sense of our individual paths.

In your practice, for example in the Endless Sea of Sand you often work with archival material. Elias, you have also worked as a film archivist and in 2021 you participated in a summer artist residency as part of a long-term project Un/Archiving Post/Industry, which focuses on the digital preservation of endangered archival collections of industrial heritage in Eastern Ukraine. What role do you see in the process of archiving and un-archiving for the narrative of the destruction that Ukraine is facing due Russian aggression? What role archiving and un-archiving can bring to the long struggle for Ukrainian independence? And do you think about the role of archives for the process of recovering as well?

Elias Parvulesco: The roots of my interest in archival elements are very simple. First, I have a degree in film preservation. Secondly, I have always liked the ecological idea of reusing. We found a tremendous potential for rewatching and reinterpreting archival visual materials and historical papers. Unfortunately, Ukraine had a terrible history and was a colony for a long time; also, it was a territory for inhuman Soviet experiments. So the current generation is facing a huge dilemma: either to forget and abandon the past, or accept it and be responsible. We can consider the war to be one of the outcomes of this dilemma. My only concern about having the double identity of artist and archivist is that filmmakers usually use archival materials without proper respect for them.For instance, there is a trend in art and documentaries to use archival footage. But I have noticed that even famous artists sometimes use poor digital copies of films without trying to spotlight the fate and preservation conditions of the original film material and the work of archivists and restorers to save and provide access to these artifacts.

The Russian full-scale invasion is not just destroying lives, land, and hopes, but also memory. Without living memory truth can stay hidden forever. How important do you think it is to try to preserve archival materials and to make them accessible? Do you see your own films as an attempt to preserve the memory?

Elias Parvulesco: This is a good point. Ukrainian intellectuals have talked a lot about the destruction of memory – for instance, Darya Tsymbalyuk called cultural erasure a key motif of the Russian colonial strategy. This is one more dimension that Ukrainians ought to resist by actively remembering and refilling historical lacunas of the forgotten. That’s why Ukrainian history is probably the second biggest topic in contemporary Ukrainian art, cinema, and literature, after the war itself. Our contribution to this discussion is very humble, but even before the full-scale invasion, we were interested in diving into micro-stories of Ukrainian history as well as the concept of ruins as a ghostly form of historical traces.

Teta, in your psychoanalytic practice you have also focused on research of nuclear narratives in Soviet cinema. Can you share something from this research? Was it connected to the Enerhodar power plant that is the topic of your film Endless Sea of Sand?

Teta Tsybulnyk: I started this research in 2022, in the wake of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, when the threat of nuclear war once again became the sword of Damocles for many people around the world. From the first days of escalation, Russia kept implicitly or explicitly appealing to its nuclear capabilities – either as a hypocritical warning of “preemptive self-defense” or a pompous promise of “the Judgment Day”. This kind of rhetorical and psychological violence became a weapon in its own right – a means of blackmail intended to intimidate and terrorize both Ukraine and its Western allies. I started looking into Soviet newsreels, documentaries, and feature films to find historical roots of today’s threats and fears of the atomic bomb. The tactic of nuclear blackmail dates back to the 1950s and the arms race of the Cold War period. Ironically, the development of the Soviet Union’s nuclear potential has usually been disguised under the peacemaking pathos. It has always been the Other who was made to seem the actual aggressor. It was interesting to explore this rhetoric in the context of the current war where Russia’s aggressive imperial attitudes are blatantly projected outwards and never admitted. Even though I didn’t complete this project, this line of research was continued in Endless Sea of Sand, where we looked into the case of Russian occupation of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant as another instance of nuclear blackmail. In the 1970s, nuclear power plants were built all over Soviet Ukraine accompanied by the ideological pathos of industrialization and mastery of new types of energy. Retrospectively, we can read this glorification of the “peaceful atom” as a deceptive rhetoric of the Soviet ideology hiding military implications of nuclear infrastructures which were eventually weaponized by Russian occupants.

Teta, you’re focusing on an inhuman or more-than-human view of the landscape. Russian aggression in Ukraine has led to widespread environmental destruction. The Donbas region has faced environmental damage as a result of Russian invasions since 2014 and according to the Center for Urban History of East Central Europe in Lviv, full scale invasion has brought massive fires at oil depots, ammunition depots, or thermal power plants, the threat of explosions at nuclear power plants, and the use of nuclear weapons. The war also produces huge amounts of waste, from destroyed machinery to the ruins of houses, pollutants such as chemicals from ammunition explosions, and toxins from bodies of dead Russian soldiers that contaminate soil and water. Can you share with us a bit of your research on this topic? How do you take a more-than-human perspective when thinking about the destruction of Ukraine? How do you perceive the relationship between Russian imperial aggression and exploiting and conquering a non-human landscape as such.

Teta Tsybulnyk: Elias and I have been working with the topics of landscape, the non-human and more-than-human perspectives before the full-scale invasion, so when the big war broke out, it was natural for us to contemplate this dimension of damage. Obviously, the ecosystems have suffered enormously due to massive bombings, mines, and chemicals. The disastrous flood caused by the Kakhovka dam destruction last year annihilated species and habitats irreparably. In this case, the human and the non-human losses are linked inseparably. In her paper De-occupation as Planetary Politics, Adriana Petryna argues that Russia aims to destroy the Ukrainians’ “foundations of livelihood”, employing the strategy of making the environment unlivable, which of course affects humans and non-humans alike. The environmental damage inflicted upon Ukraine is sometimes referred to as vertical occupation, a form of slow violence rooted in the colonial nature of this war.

While making films for international audiences, do you think about the limits of empathy – that one can never truly know and feel another’s suffering, and therefore empathy is impossible to fulfill? Is there another way to approach other people’s pain? For example, queer and feminist theorist Sarah Ahmed talks about empathy in the context of the colonization of psychic space. She warns us from appropriating someone else’s pain and urges us to prioritize active listening over co called empathy. How can you relate to this theory?

Elias Parvulesco: I didn’t think about it, particularly in Ahmed’s terms, but I remember that the idea of empathy and the practices of care were a new important turn in the art of the late 2010s. However, in the context of the ongoing war, it is difficult and sometimes impossible to keep empathy at the proper level. Sometimes it’s even hard to make silly friendly small talk with people who don’t share the war experience and the same level of anxiety. I have thought a lot about how to talk about these communication problems and ideas of care and solidarity through art, but I’ve found that the art forms I like are not limitless. Maybe that’s why I make fewer films and artworks now than I used to.

What do you think is the role of art in the national liberation struggle? Do you feel like with the full-scale invasion your responsibility as an Ukrainian artist towards society changed? If yes, then in which way?

Elias Parvulesco: When the full-scale invasion happened, I honestly felt guilty that we, artists, scholars, curators, hadn’t done enough to avoid the war. Unsurprisingly, art is a weak agency nowadays. It’s not bad news, and it’s not a reason to quit art production. However, it is a reason not to be too serious and not to expect too much from artists. These days in Ukraine artists also take on roles of volunteers, journalists, or soldiers. As artists, we try not to feel guilty and produce works about war crimes and consequences of destruction. Even though most of our thoughts in recent years have been about the war, I dream that Ukraine and its artists would be interesting to the world also with other themes and forms. I believe that today we have a very sensitive and keen generation of Ukrainian artists.