Landscapes of Recovery: The Role of Art in the Ecological Restoration of Ukraine
Date and Time
Location
A presentation by Liza Goncharenko, Researcher with the Art & Ecology Group at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp
Chaired by Emily Channell-Justice, Director of the Temerty Contemporary Ukraine Program at HURI. Attendees are invited to enjoy an informal lunch.
This event is organized by HURI as part of the Ukraine Study Group public event series and Temerty Contemporary Ukraine Program.
About the Lecture
What forms of restoration become possible when we move beyond the human-centered language of reconstruction and begin to understand damaged landscapes as living, contested, and continuously transforming archives?
War-affected landscapes in Ukraine operate as more-than-human archives: environments in which soil, vegetation, water, infrastructure, animals, and human bodies register and transform the effects of violence over time. Rather than treating damaged landscapes as passive sites awaiting reconstruction, Liza Goncharenko approaches them as active and changing systems whose ecological processes complicate human narratives of destruction, recovery, and repair.
Moving across architecture, landscape research, drawing, writing, and artistic publishing, the project uses maps, field drawings, archival material, satellite imagery, ecological diagrams, and speculative narratives to investigate what becomes visible when a landscape is understood through multiple temporalities and scales. Forest succession, contaminated soils, abandoned infrastructure, spontaneous vegetation, and traces of military activity become forms of evidence through which another history of war can be constructed.
In dialogue with The Earth Is Burning—a publication project bringing together artistic practices concerned with ecological crisis, damaged environments, and alternative forms of knowledge—this talk considers how artistic methods can operate not simply to represent environmental destruction, but to produce new ways of seeing, remembering, and imagining ecological futures.
About the Speaker
Liza Goncharenko is a licensed Belgian-Ukrainian architect, urban designer, and researcher. Her practice explores war-affected landscapes, ecological recovery, memory and more-than-human forms of territorial agency through writing, drawing and visual research. Her writing has appeared in architectural and cultural publications, including MAJA, KERB, The Contrapuntal, AWC Journal,TYPE.IE and MONU. She undertook writing and research residencies at the Irish Architecture Foundation in Dublin and Hospitalfield in Scotland, alongside Art OMI, and the Institute for Public Architecture in New York. She is currently a researcher with the Art & Ecology group at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp and Residency Unlimited in New York supported by the Flanders State of the Art.
