Together, over the last year and a half, we utilized different research approaches - from OSINT to academic and artistic research - to trace and unsettle the layered systems of the material, symbolic, psychological, and infrastructural, through which the russian occupation of Ukraine is exercised and sustained.
Independent research group: Diana Yehorova, Lera Malchenko, Kateryna Volochniuk, Oleksii Minko, Vlada Vazheyevskyy, Anna Sietak, Nazar Golianych
The project was supported by «Documenting Ukraine», a program of the Institute for Human Sciences, IWM Vienna.
Please find more on the website (specified in bio).
For the research project Occupational Formations, Anna works with countercartography as a resistance practice against russian spatial planning strategies, imposed on the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine. Her text presents the results of the research into occupier-produced maps and shares insights about organising a workshop on mental maps for internally displaced persons in Ukraine.
Anna Sietak is a researcher and educator, currently studying Political Science and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Vienna. Her research interests are rooted in the Ukrainian context and cover political participation, inclusive education, cultural heritage and the exploration of postcolonial and feminist methodologies.
In their offering to this project, Vlada Vazheyevskyy works through the limits of visual representation of the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine, as well as the politics of seeing territories and people under military occupation mediated by screens. Through a focus on an image which Kateryna Ustiuhova - a writer and a dear friend from Kreminna, Ukraine, has shared with them during their masters fieldwork, they attend to the unhoming potential of images of destroyed housing, and the ways in which such unhoming abets the goals of the Russian occupation in the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine. They too, however, think of the ways in which the weaponisation of such imagery can be refused and negated.
For the Occupational Formations, Oleksii maps Russian governmental initiatives which are under pedagogical, educational, entertaining and recreational agenda, conducts the indoctrination and militarization of Ukrainian children and youth. Observing forms of children’s leisure, organized after 2022 in the temporarily occupied South of Ukraine by Russian-state actors, he noticed the propagandistic narratives embedded in the practices that occupiers impose on children. He shows how travel programs, leadership trainings, camps and engagement in urban security service activity are used as a way to confuse children’s identity, instil loyalty to the Russian occupation among youth and induce children to serve in the Russian Army. Minko argues that Russian children’s policy functions as an integral part of its military and security strategy, treating children as military resources for both ongoing and future aggressions.
Oleksii Minko is a Kyiv-based writer from the temporarily occupied city of Berdyansk. He is studying philosophy as an MA student at the Dragomanov Ukrainian State University (Kyiv). In his texts, he examines the impact of Russian colonial bureaucracy, movement restrictions, and propaganda on the fields of housing, pedagogy, and public memory in the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine.
Within Occupational Formations Lera Malchenko and Nazar Golianych collected and structured open-source data on the organizers and executors of construction projects in Russian-occupied Ukrainian territories.
Based on this body of material, the Evidence-Based Notes (EBN) format was proposed as a way to register the unfolding machinery of occupation through a field-based research approach. The resulting table outlines the high-level architecture of the occupation building apparatus, showing how contractors continually recombine and reorganize through nominal legal entities, shifting directors, and rebranded branches of Russian firms seeking to conceal their involvement and evade sanctions.
In her contribution to Occupational Formations, Kateryna Volochniuk traces the role visuality played during the Crimean War and its potential continuity and connection with the politics of the current Russian occupation of the peninsula. At the same time, Kateryna looks at how Ukrainian artists develop their own approaches to represent their homeland and capture the subtle signs of everyday brutality.
Kateryna Volochniuk is a Ukraine-born, Scotland-based historian of photography and researcher; she is a SGSAH-funded PhD Candidate at the University of St Andrews.
Within Occupational Formations, Lera Malchenko @temporary__name__ examines how Russia’s digital occupation infrastructure in Ukraine turns violence into a routinized technical workflow.
Building on the case first introduced in the @fantasticlittlesplash essay «Being on EI», she extends her inquiry into the actors and structures that sustain these occupational systems. Revisiting Bauman and Arendt, she reframes the bureaucracy of violence through the lens of contemporary IT development approaches, showing how mass violence can be organized as an ordinary labor process enabled by agile workflows, distributed responsibility, and technical abstraction.
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Lera Malchenko is a journalist, analyst, and interdisciplinary artist specializing in media and investigative research. She works as a senior analyst and forward deployed engineer at Osavul, tracking FIMI campaigns. Her research interests center on digital and emotional infrastructures, as well as communicative militarism. As a co-founder of the ‘fantastic little splash’ group, she explores collective imagination and emotional appropriation within technosocial systems.
If the iron hand’s grip remains firm, what exactly does it hold onto?
You can read Interimezzo on occformations.com.ua/interimezzo/
In Interimezzo, Di Yehorova revisits Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky’s 1908 Intermezzo, tracing echoes between a century-old text and contemporary occupation through micro-worlds of human and more-than-human kinships.
Prelude with No Beginning: Text1
by Di Yehorova
Di Yehorova is an interdisciplinary researcher, writer, and documentary producer interested in temporality, rupture, and the politics of space. Their work for Occupational Infrastructures deploys counter-cartographic approaches to explore topologies of loss and love, speculative geographies of occupation, and alternative modes of knowing that emerge when conventional epistemologies fail.
