Apocalyptic unlearning : vulnerable legacies and cultural reimaginings in wartime Kharkiv, Ukraine (2022–2024)

The thesis, Apocalyptic Unlearning: Vulnerable Legacies and Cultural Reimaginings in Kharkiv, Ukraine (2022–2024) investigates aesthetic, cultural, and social transformations in the city of Kharkiv during the first three years after the escalation of the Russo-Ukrainian war. The main goal of the study is to document the way urban communities adapt to continuous military threat, social precarity, and fragility of built infrastructures. The project looks at the artistic and cultural initiatives that arise in the space of the city, at decolonial practices of both local government and the activists, as well as daily routes and routines adopted in response to the changing tactics of Russian military assaults on the city in 2022–2024. Essentially, it is an attempt to answer the question of how to live in a wartime city with the population of over a million inhabitants, how to experience time, space, the place’s colonial past and a fragile future during war. This study explores the processes of physical, social, and cultural transformations through the concept of apocalyptic unlearning. Apocalyptic unlearning serves as a composite term that employs theories of Anthropocene and decolonial studies to elucidate a gesture of forgetting the previous hierarchies of knowledge to form new meaningful practices of knowledge-making. The project takes use of embodied mobile methodologies and theories of movement.