Zhytnia Svitlana

This project is an artistic exploration of collective memory and its subjective reflection in human consciousness. In this work I turn to the Poltava region of Ukraine, particularly the villages of Baranivka (Myrhorod district) and Velbivka (Hadiach district).

Although these settlements have not experienced direct destruction as a result of the war, they remain important centers of life and memory for local activists and residents. At the same time, the Poltava region is connected to my own family history — it is the homeland of my mother and a place deeply tied to my personal memories.

The project has an open and evolving structure. As field research and material collection continue in the Poltava region, it will gradually expand, including the village where my mother was born. In this way, the virtual environment functions as a dynamic cloud archive of memory, growing through new voices, stories, and fragments of lived experience.

The worlds I create exist simultaneously as documentation of real places and as my subjective perception of them. They form a collage of memories where events, people, landscapes, sounds, and stories merge into a surreal and ghost-like universe.

When traveling through these virtual rooms, it is impossible to construct a precise geographical map or a linear historical narrative. Seasons and places overlap, songs echo with natural sounds, and textures dissolve like fragments of dreams.

For me, the importance of this project is connected to the realization of the fragility and temporality of the environments in which we live, both local and national. I attempt to capture my own memories, impressions, and feelings about what Ukraine means to me today — what these villages are like, what happens there, and which everyday rituals and objects shape the fabric of life.

My understanding of memory as both an individual and collective phenomenon defines the artistic approach of this work. Memories are fragmented, rarely chronological, and constantly transforming. My memory is not an archive or a database, but a living human structure where imagination and reality merge into a meditative journey through virtual spaces.

The project combines field recordings of sounds and singing, oral histories, and 3D scans of landscapes, architecture, everyday objects, and people. These elements are assembled into virtual rooms on the web platform Arrival Space, where viewers from different countries can freely navigate through the environment of my memories — exploring a virtual universe of Poltava landscapes, listening to songs, sounds, and reflections, and discovering Ukrainian culture and the material heritage of everyday life.

Within this project, the preservation of cultural heritage appears not as documentary reconstruction but as an artistic gesture — a way to capture fragile and often invisible layers of memory that shape identity and connection to place. Small local communities, which rarely receive public attention, gain the opportunity to be seen and heard in an artistic dimension. Their everyday practices, landscapes, voices, and stories hold cultural and social value equal to well-known historical monuments, because they preserve the living fabric of collective memory.